Detection of key gene InDels in TGF-β pathway and its relationship with growth traits in four sheep breeds

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.

Keywords:

• Growth traits
• insertion/deletion (InDel)
• LTBP1
• THBS1
• SMAD4

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.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by China Agriculture Research System [CARS-34], Shaanxi Province Key Research and Development Program [2018ZDXM-NY-040], Integrated Demonstration Project of Key Technologies for Cattle and Sheep Breeding and Farming in Farming-Pastoral Ecotone of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs [No.16190050].