Abstract
TGF-β signaling pathway plays an important role in regulating cell proliferation and differentiation, embryonic development, bone formation, etc. LTBP1, THBS1, SMAD4 and other genes are important members of TGF-β signaling pathway. LTBP1 binds to TGF-β, while THBS1 binds to LTBP1, which is an important signal transduction molecule in the TGF-β pathway. In order to explore the effects of the insertion/deletion variation of three genes (LTBP1, THBS1, SMAD4) in the TGF-β signaling pathway on the growth traits such as body length and body weight of sheep, a total of 625 healthy individuals from 4 breeds of the Tong sheep, Hu sheep, small-tail Han sheep and Lanzhou fat-tail sheep were identified and analyzed. In this study, we identified 4 InDel loci: one loci of LTBP1, two loci of THBS1, and one loci of SMAD4, respectively named as: InDel-1 (deletion 13 bp), InDel-2 (deletion 16 bp), InDel-3 (deletion 22 bp), InDel-4 (deletion 7 bp). Among the 4 analyzed breeds, association analysis showed that all new InDel polymorphisms were significantly associated with 10 different growth traits (p < 0.05), which may provide a theoretical basis for sheep breeding to accelerate the progression of marker-assisted selection in sheep breeding.
Author contributions
Conceptualization, Shuhui Wang and Xiuzhu Sun; Data curation, Xiaohua Yi and Mingli Wu; Formal analysis, Haidong Zhao and Shirong Liu; Funding acquisition, Xiuzhu Sun; Investigation, Yun Pan, Qi Li, Xiaoqin Tang and Yanjiao Zhu; Methodology, Shuhui Wang; Supervision, Xiuzhu Sun; Writing-original draft, Xiaohua Yi.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.