Oxygen concentration is essential for appropriate metabolism.Hypoxia can exert a significant impact on physiological alteration of the cell and organism.Tibetan Chicken(Gallus gallus) is a Chinese indigenous breed inhabiting in Tibetan areas,which is also a chicken breed living at high altitude for the longest time in the world.It has developed an adaptive mechanism to hypoxia,which is demonstrated by that Tibetan Chicken has much higher hatchability than low-land chicken breeds in high-altitude areas of Tibet.In the present study,Tibetan Chicken fertilized full sib eggs were incubated up to Hamburger-Hamilton stage 43 under 13% and 21% oxygen concentration,respectively.Shouguang Chicken and Dwarf Recessive White Chicken were used as control groups.The hearts in all of the 3 chicken breeds under hypoxic and normoxic conditions were isolated and hybridized to Genechip Chicken Genome Array to study molecular mechanisms underlying the adaptation to high altitude of Tibetan Chicken.As a result,50 transcripts highly expressed in hypoxia are screened out.Among up-regulated genes,some are involved in the gene ontology(GO) such as cell growth,cell difference,muscle contraction and signal transduction.However,the expression levels of 21 transcripts are lower in hypoxia than those in normoxia.Some down-regulated genes take part in cell communication,ion transport,protein amino acid phosphorylation and signal transduction.Interestingly,gene enrichment analyses of these differential gene expressions are mainly associated with immune system response and ion channel activity in response to stimulus.Moreover,the transcriptional expression profiles analyzed by hierarchical clustering and CPP-SOM software in all of the 3 different chicken breeds revealed that Tibetan Chicken is much closely related to Shouguang Chicken rather than Dwarf Recessive White Chicken.In addition,12 transcripts of Tibetan Chicken breed-specific expressed genes were identified,which seem to result in a more effective and efficient induction of energy dema
LI Mei & ZHAO ChunJiang College of Animal Science and Technology,China Agricultural University,Beijing 100193,China
Tibetan chicken lives in high-altitude area and has adapted well to hypoxia genetically. Shouguang chicken and Silky chicken are both lowland chicken breeds. In the present study, the complete mito-chondrial genome sequences of the three chicken breeds were all sequenced. The results showed that the mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) of Shouguang chicken and Silky chicken consist of 16784 bp and 16785 bp respectively, and Tibetan chicken mitochondrial genome varies from 16784 bp to 16786 bp. After sequence analysis, 120 mutations, including 4 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in tRNA genes, 9 SNPs and 1 insertion in rRNA genes, 38 SNPs and 1 deletion in D-LOOP, 66 SNPs in pro-tein-coding genes, were found. This work will provide clues for the future study on the association between mitochondrial genes and the adaptation to hypoxia.
BAO HaiGang, ZHAO ChunJiang, LI JunYing & WU ChangXin College of Animal Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100094, China
CACNA1S gene encodes the α1 subunit of the calcium channel. The mutation of CACNA1S gene can cause hypokalemic periodic paralysis (HypoKPP) and maliglant hyperthermia synarome (MHS) in hu-man beings. Current research on CACNA1S was mainly in human being and model animal, but rarely in livestock and poultry. In this study, Yorkshire pigs (23), Pietrain pigs (30), Jinhua pigs (115) and the second generation (126) of crossbred of Jinhua and Pietrain were used. Primers were designed ac-cording to the sequence of human CACNA1S gene and PCR was carried out using pig genome DNA. PCR products were sequenced and compared with that of human, and then single nucleotide poly-morphisms (SNPs) were investigated by PCR-SSCP, while PCR-RFLP tests were performed to validate the mutations. Results indicated: (1) the 5211 bp DNA fragments of porcine CACNA1S gene were ac-quired (GenBank accession number: DQ767693 ) and the identity of the exon region was 82.6% be-tween human and pig; (2) fifty-seven mutations were found within the cloned sequences, among which 24 were in exon region; (3) the results of PCR-RFLP were in accordance with that of PCR-SSCP. Ac-cording to the EST of porcine CACNA1S gene published in GenBank (Bx914582, Bx666997), 8 of the 11 SNPs identified in the present study were consistent with the base difference between two EST frag-ments.
FANG XiaoMin1,2, XU NingYing2 & REN ShouWen1 1 Institute of Animal Science, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing 210014, China
