Abstract:

In recent years, there have been great differences in the number of eggs laid by individuals of Zhuanghe Dagu chickens. Alternative splicing (AS) is an important mechanism of post-transcriptional regulation of eukaryotic genes, but there is no research on the correlation between AS and egg production in avian pituitary and hypothalamus. Based on RNA-Seq technology, this experiment analyzed the AS events of Zhuanghe Dagu chickens. The results showed that 769 and 813 differential AS events were detected in the pituitary and hypothalamic libraries, respectively. Five types of AS events were identified in both libraries (pituitary, hypothalamus), with the highest proportion of exon skipping (SE) and the lowest proportion of alternative 5' splice site (A5SS); NRCAM, SLMAP and CIB1 gene had a higher frequency of AS; 644 and 680 differentially spliced genes (DSGs) were screened from the two tissue libraries, respectively, with the highest proportion of SE and the lowest proportion of A5SS. GO and KEGG enrichment analysis annotated 329 and 337 DSGs, respectively; RT-PCR detection found that ESR1 was present in different AS events; a total of 6758 new transcripts were obtained from 12 libraries, and 12486 gene were optimized. The findings not only expand the understanding of AS events in poultry pituitary and hypothalamic tissues, but also provide new ideas for improving chicken egg production in research and production.

Key words: chicken, alternative splicing, RNA-Seq, differentially spliced genes, egg production