Abstract
Dairy goats serve as an important source of milk and also fulfill agricultural and economic roles in developing countries. Understanding the genetic background of goat mammary gland is important for research on the regulatory mechanisms controlling tissue function and the synthesis of milk components. We collected tissue at four different stages of goat mammary gland development and generated approximately 25 GB of data from Illumina de novo RNA sequencing. The combined reads were assembled into 51,361 unigenes, and approximately 60.07 % of the unigenes had homology to other proteins in the NCBI non-redundant protein database (NR). Functional classification through eukaryotic Ortholog Groups of Protein (KOG), gene ontology (GO), and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) revealed that the unigenes from goat mammary glands are involved in a wide range of biological processes and metabolic pathways, including lipid metabolism and lactose metabolism. The results of qPCR revealed that genes encoding FABP3, FASN, SCD, PLIN2, whey proteins (LALBA and BLG), and caseins (CSN1S1, CSN1S2, CSN2 and CSN3) at 100 and 310 days postpartum increased significantly compared with the non-lactating period. In addition to their role in lipid and protein synthesis, the higher expression at 310 days postpartum could contribute to mammary cell turnover during pregnancy. In conclusion, this is the first study to characterize the complete transcriptome of goat mammary glands and constitutes a comprehensive genomic resource available for further studies of ruminant lactation.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Prof. Li Changan (Northwest A&F University) for surgical sampling of mammary gland tissue, the goat farm crew for taking care of the animals, and researchers of the Dairy Goat Lab of Northwest A&F University for useful discussion. The authors thank Prof. Rudi Appels from the Murdoch University (Australia) for language help during revising the manuscript. This work is jointly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31372281), the Transgenic New Species Breeding Program of China (2014ZX08009-051B), and the “Special Fund for Agro-scientific Research in the Public Interest (201103038)”.
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Hengbo Shi and Jiangjiang Zhu contributed equally to this paper.
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Supporting file 1
The final assembly of goat mammary gland Unigenes (part 1) (RAR) (FASTA 36852 kb)
Supporting file 2
The final assembly of goat mammary gland Unigenes (part 2) (RAR) (FASTA 29197 kb)
Supporting file 3
Microsatellite DNA loci in goat mammary gland sequences (RAR) (MISA 346 kb)
Supporting file 4
The number of different Microsatellite DNA loci in goat mammary gland. (TXT 0 kb)
Supporting file 5
The species distribution blast hit in NR. (XLSX 11 kb)
Supporting file 6
The description of the model in Fig. 7 (DOCX 19 kb)
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Shi, H., Zhu, J., Luo, J. et al. Genes regulating lipid and protein metabolism are highly expressed in mammary gland of lactating dairy goats. Funct Integr Genomics 15, 309–321 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-014-0420-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-014-0420-1