Project description:Milk can mediate maternal-neonatal signal transmission by the bioactive component-extracellular vesicles (EVs), which select specific types of miRNA to encapsulate. The miRNA profiling of sheep milk EVs was characterized by sequencing and compared with that of cow milk. Sheep milk EVs contained various small RNAs, including tRNA, Cis-regulatory element, rRNA, snRNA, other Rfam RNA, and miRNA, which held about 36% of all the small RNAs. Totally 84 types of miRNAs were annotated with Ovis aries by miRBase (version 22.0) in sheep milk EVs, with 75 shared types of miRNAs in all samples. Fourteen sheep milk EV-miRNAs in the top 20, occupying 98% of the total expression, were immune-related.
Project description:The sheep (Ovis aries) plays a major socio-economic role in the world. Copy number variations (CNVs) are increasingly recognized as a key and potent source of genetic variation and phenotypic diversity, but little is known about the extent to which CNVs contribute to genetic variation in Chinese sheep breeds. Analyses of CNVs in the genomes of eight sheep breeds were performed using the sheep SNP50 BeadChip genotyping array. A total of 111 CNV regions (CNVRs) were obtained from 160 Chinese sheep breeds. These CNVRs covered 13.75 Mb of the sheep genome sequence. A total of 22 Go terms and 17 candidate genes were obtained from the functional analysis. Ten CNVRs were selected for validation, of which 7 CNVRs were further experimentally confirmed by quantitative PCR. Four candidate genes were selected to confirm the results of the functional analysis. These results provide a resource for furthering understanding of ruminant biology, and for further improving the genetic quality of sheep breeds.
Project description:Here we present a high-density in situ synthesized microarray for Ovis aries, named Aristaeus, designed by means of a pipeline of software instruments that, starting from non-annotated redundant EST sequences, selects oligonucleotides suitable for in situ generation on chip. The chip was tested by comparing the gene expression profiles of two sheep breeds with different phenotype, Sarda and Gentile di Puglia. We carried out microarray experiments on liver and udder tissues from lactating individuals and identified a relevant number of differentially expressed genes, all involved in metabolism pathways. The results are consistent with literature knowledge, while selected differential gene expressions have been confirmed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction analyses. Tissue samples of liver were collected from 4 lactating individuals of two sheep (Ovis aries) breeds, Gentile di Puglia and Sarda. Biopsies of liver tissue were taken at second lactation stage (first record, stage 01: 6 days after lambing; second record, stage 02: 44 days after lambing) in both breeds. Tissues from liver were immersed in RNAlater (Sigma) immediately after biopsy and stored at -20°C. Samples were pooled by breed and then reverse labeled (cy5 and cy3), resulting in four raw data sets.