High-throughput sequencing reveals crucial miRNAs in skeletal muscle development of Bian chicken

ABSTRACT

1. Growth performance is significant for chickens. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been found to play important roles in the post-transcriptional regulation of skeletal muscle growth. However, the mechanism of miRNAs in this process has not been elucidated.

2. This study involved collecting leg muscle from slow- and fast-growing groups of Bian chicken at 16 weeks of age for high-throughput sequencing. A total of 42 differentially expressed miRNAs (DEMs) were identified. Among them, 22 DEMs were up-regulated and 20 DEMs were down-regulated.

3. Biological process terms, relating to growth, were found by GO enrichment for target genes of DEMs and KEGG pathway analysis of target genes. This revealed some significantly enriched pathways closely related to skeletal muscle development, such as the calcium signalling pathway, ECM-receptor interaction, lysine degradation, apoptosis and tight junctions. Network interaction analysis of DEMs and target genes showed that the top fifty hub genes were targeted by thirteen DEMs.

4. Four important miRNAs (novel_miR_158, novel_miR_144, novel_miR_291, and miR-205a) as well as some other valuable miRNAs, such as gga-miR-214 and gga-miR-3525 were identified. The qPCR results of five DEMs were highly consistent with that of sequencing between the two groups, which proved the reliability of miRNA-seq.

5. The study will help to improve the molecular mechanism of miRNAs in chickens and guide future experiments concerning miRNA function in chicken growth.

KEYWORDS:

• miRNA-seq
• Bian chicken
• skeletal muscle
• growth and development
• differentially expressed miRNAs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Raw data has been uploaded to the SRA database under accession number PRJNA682247.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

The study was jointly supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China [31201793], Shanxi Province Science and Technology Research Projects [201703D221022-3], The China Agriculture Research System [CARS-41], and The Priority Academic Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD).