The effects of dietary betaine supplementation on fatty liver performance, serum parameters, histological changes, methylation status and the mRNA expression level of Spot14α in Landes goose fatty liver

Abstract

We evaluated the effects of betaine supplementation on liver weight, liver/body weight, serum parameters and morphological changes. Compared with the control and overfed groups, the geese that were fed the betaine diet showed increased liver weight and decreased abdominal adipose tissue weight compared with the overfeeding groups. Betaine treatment also significantly increased ChE, HDL, LDH and ALT levels ( P < 0.01 or P < 0.05). Decreased macrovesicular steatosis and increased microvesicular steatosis were observed in the betaine-treated group, and the lipid was well-distributed in the betaine supplement group. The expression of S14α mRNA in the livers of the betaine-treated geese was higher than that in the control or the overfed geese. We performed sodium bisulfite sequencing of the individual alleles of this region (between + 374 and − 8 base pairs relative to the transcription start site), containing 33 CpG dinucleotides. In the overfed group expressing higher S14α transcripts, the average methylation at the 33 CpGs sites was 87.9%. This contrasted with 69.6% in the control group that showed lower expression of the S14α gene ( P < 0.01). However, no significant change in methylation in the transcription start site was found between the betaine-treated geese (82.6%) and the overfed geese (87.9%). These results indicate that the DNA methylation pattern in the S14α gene transcription start site may not be related to the expression of S14α transcript in response to betaine supplementation.