Abstract
In the poultry industry, excessive fat deposition is considered an undesirable factor, affecting feed efficiency, meat production cost, meat quality, and consumer’s health. Efforts to reduce fat deposition in economically important animals, such as chicken, can be made through different strategies; including genetic selection, feeding strategies, housing, and environmental strategies, as well as hormone supplementation. Recent investigations at the molecular level have revealed the significant role of the transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory networks and their interaction on modulating fat metabolism in chickens. At the transcriptional level, different transcription factors are known to regulate the expression of lipogenic and adipogenic genes through various signaling pathways, affecting chicken fat metabolism. Alternatively, at the post-transcriptional level, the regulatory mechanism of microRNAs (miRNAs) on lipid metabolism and deposition has added a promising dimension to understand the structural and functional regulatory mechanism of lipid metabolism in chicken. Therefore, this review focuses on the progress made in unraveling the molecular function of genes, transcription factors, and more notably significant miRNAs responsible for regulating adipogenesis, lipogenesis, and fat deposition in chicken. Moreover, a better understanding of the molecular regulation of lipid metabolism will give researchers novel insights to use functional molecular markers, such as miRNAs, for selection against excessive fat deposition to improve chicken production efficiency and meat quality.
Highlights
Chicken, as an economically important agricultural avian species, is currently considered an ideal experimental animal model for biomedical research fields, including the study of the biological mechanisms and genetic regulation of fat metabolism [1]
It has been evaluated that the main proportion (70%) of fatty acid synthesis in chicken occurs in the hepatocytes through the process named lipogenesis (Figure 1), and only 5% happens in the chicken adipose tissue
It is revealed that PPARα is negatively correlated with intramuscular fat (IMF) content in thigh muscle and its expression level in thigh muscle is higher than abdominal fat in chicken, which is consistent with the fact that fat accumulation in the thigh is lower than abdominal fat [48]
Summary
As an economically important agricultural avian species, is currently considered an ideal experimental animal model for biomedical research fields, including the study of the biological mechanisms and genetic regulation of fat metabolism [1]. It is well understood that a significant part of the eukaryotic genome is transcribed to non-protein-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), which have different sizes ranging from 20 nucleotides to 100 kb and have vital roles in regulating many biological processes, including lipid metabolism Among these ncRNAs, microRNAs have attracted attention [12], and are progressively recognized as critical regulators of cholesterol and fatty acid homeostasis, lipid metabolism [3], adipogenesis [13,14], and fat deposition [6] through regulating the expression of target genes at the post-transcriptional level. Since miRNAs, as endogenous post-transcription regulatory factors, regulate the expression of various genes involved in lipid metabolism in chicken, constructing miRNA-mRNA interaction networks analysis enable researchers to indicate miRNAs and their target genes, which have an important role in the regulation of fat metabolism [15]. Genes 2021, 12, 414 the molecular regulation mechanism of fat metabolism at the transcriptional and posttranscriptional level
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