Abstract
Skeletal muscle growth and development from embryo to adult consists of a series of carefully regulated changes in gene expression. This study aimed to identify candidate genes involved in chicken growth and development and to investigate the potential regulatory mechanisms of early growth in Haiyang yellow chicken. RNA sequencing was used to compare the transcriptomes of chicken muscle tissues at four developmental stages. In total, 6150 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (fold change 2; false discovery rate (FDR) 0.05) were detected by pairwise comparison in female chickens. Functional analysis showed that the DEGs were mainly involved in the processes of muscle growth and development and cell differentiation. Many of the DEGs, such as MSTN, MYOD1, MYF6, MYF5, and IGF1, were related to chicken growth and development. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis showed that the DEGs were significantly enriched in four pathways related to growth and development: extracellular matrix (ECM)–receptor interaction, focal adhesion, tight junction, and insulin signalling pathways. A total of 42 DEGs assigned to these pathways are potential candidate genes for inducing the differences in growth among the four development stages, such as MYH1A, EGF, MYLK2, MYLK4, and LAMB3. This study identified a range of genes and several pathways that may be involved in regulating early growth.
Highlights
Skeletal muscle, which accounts for approximately 40 % of the body weight of mammals, is an important tissue involved in the regulation of metabolism, locomotion and strength (Frontera and Ochala, 2015)
Muscle growth and development from the embryonic to the adult stage of an organism consists of a series of exquisitely regulated and orchestrated changes in the expression of genes leading to muscle maturation
We found that CD36 (Enciu et al, 2018; Yao et al, 2019), PHGDH (Li et al, 2017), WNT11 (Guo et al, 2018), and TWIST3 (Kragl et al, 2013) were associated with cell proliferation and that the ACACB (Tang, 2015), ACSL1 (Cao et al, 2018), and FABP3 (Zhang, 2015) genes play an important role in fat deposition and metabolism
Summary
Skeletal muscle, which accounts for approximately 40 % of the body weight of mammals, is an important tissue involved in the regulation of metabolism, locomotion and strength (Frontera and Ochala, 2015). The study of muscle development in agriculturally important species is essential to achieving increased body weight and muscle mass. It is well established that the number of muscle fibres is determined embryonically (Smith, 1963), as myoblasts, originating as somites, migrate to the appropriate site of muscle formation and proliferate during the process of hyperplasia. These myoblasts withdraw from the cell cycle, fuse to form multi-nucleated myotubes, and differentiate with the commencement of muscle-specific protein expression.
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