Transcriptome Analysis of Post-Hatch Breast Muscle in Legacy and Modern Broiler Chickens Reveals Enrichment of Several Regulators of Myogenic Growth
Date
2015-03-30
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Publisher
PLoS ONE
Abstract
Agriculture provides excellent model systems for understanding how selective pressure, as applied by humans, can affect the genomes of plants and animals. One such system is modern poultry breeding in which intensive genetic selection has been applied for meat production in the domesticated chicken. As a result, modern meat-type chickens (broilers) exhibit enhanced growth, especially of the skeletal muscle, relative to their legacy counterparts. Comparative studies of modern and legacy broiler chickens provide an opportunity to identify genes and pathways affected by this human-directed evolution. This study used RNA-seq to compare the transcriptomes of a modern and a legacy broiler line to identify differentially enriched genes in the breast muscle at days 6 and 21 post-hatch. Among the 15,945 genes analyzed, 10,841 were expressed at greater than 0.1 RPKM. At day 6 post-hatch 189 genes, including several regulators of myogenic growth and development, were differentially enriched between the two lines. The transcriptional profiles between lines at day 21 post-hatch identify 193 genes differentially enriched and still include genes associated with myogenic growth. This study identified differentially enriched genes that regulate myogenic growth and differentiation between the modern and legacy broiler lines. Specifically, differences in the ratios of several positive (IGF1, IGF1R, WFIKKN2) and negative (MSTN, ACE) myogenic growth regulators may help explain the differences underlying the enhanced growth characteristics of the modern broilers.
Description
This article was originally published in PLoS ONE. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122525.
© 2015 Davis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Citation
Davis RVN, Lamont SJ, Rothschild MF, Persia ME, Ashwell CM, Schmidt CJ (2015) Transcriptome Analysis of Post-Hatch Breast Muscle in Legacy and Modern Broiler Chickens Reveals Enrichment of Several Regulators of Myogenic Growth. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0122525. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122525