Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
College/Unit
Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design
Department/Program/Center
Division of Animal and Nutritional Sciences
Abstract
Background
Previous molecular genetic studies of physiology and pigmentation of sheep skin have focused primarily on a limited number of genes and proteins. To identify additional genes that may play important roles in coat color regulation, Illumina sequencing technology was used to catalog global gene expression profiles in skin of sheep with white versus black coat color.
Results
There were 90,006 and 74,533 unigenes assembled from the reads obtained from white and black sheep skin, respectively. Genes encoding for the ribosomal proteins and keratin associated proteins were most highly expressed. A total of 2,235 known genes were differentially expressed in black versus white sheep skin, with 479 genes up-regulated and 1,756 genes down-regulated. A total of 845 novel genes were differentially expressed in black versus white sheep skin, consisting of 107 genes which were up-regulated (including 2 highly expressed genes exclusively expressed in black sheep skin) and 738 genes that were down-regulated. There was also a total of 49 known coat color genes expressed in sheep skin, from which 13 genes showed higher expression in black sheep skin. Many of these up-regulated genes, such as DCT, MATP, TYR and TYRP1, are members of the components of melanosomes and their precursor ontology category.
Conclusion
The white and black sheep skin transcriptome profiles obtained provide a valuable resource for future research to understand the network of gene expression controlling skin physiology and melanogenesis in sheep.
Digital Commons Citation
Fan, Ruiwen; Xie, Jianshan; Bai, Junming; Wang, Haidong; Tian, Xue; Bai, Rui; Jia, Xiaoyun; Yang, Lei; Herrid, Muren; Gao, Wenjun; He, xiaoyan; Yao, Jianbo; Smith, George W.; and Dong, Changsheng, "Skin transcriptome profiles associated with coat color in sheep" (2013). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 2623.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/2623
Source Citation
Fan, R., Xie, J., Bai, J. et al. Skin transcriptome profiles associated with coat color in sheep. BMC Genomics 14, 389 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-14-389
Comments
© 2013 Fan et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.