Identification of expression QTL (eQTL) of genes expressed in porcine M. longissimus dorsi and associated with meat quality traits

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Karl Schellander¹  Manfred Schwerin²  Siriluck Ponsuksili²  Eduard Murani³  Klaus Wimmers³ 

[1] Institute of Animal Science, Animal Breeding and Husbandry Group, University of Bonn, Endenicher Allee 15, 53115, Bonn, Germany;Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology, Research Group Functional Genome Analysis, Wilhelm-Stahl-Allee 2, 18196, Dummerstorf, Germany;Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology, Research Unit Molecular Biology, Wilhelm-Stahl-Allee 2, 18196, Dummerstorf, Germany;

关键词: Meat Quality;    Cooking Loss;    Drip Loss;    Meat Quality Trait;    Resource Population;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-11-572

 received in 2010-05-23, accepted in 2010-10-16,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundGenetic analysis of transcriptional profiles is a promising approach for identifying and dissecting the genetics of complex traits like meat performance. Accordingly, expression levels obtained by microarray analysis were taken as phenotypes in a linkage analysis to map eQTL. Moreover, expression levels were correlated with traits related to meat quality and principle components with high loadings of these traits. By using an up-to-date annotation and localization of the respective probe-sets, the integration of eQTL mapping data and information of trait correlated expression finally served to point to candidate genes for meat quality traits.ResultsGenome-wide transcriptional profiles of M. longissimus dorsi RNAs samples of 74 F2 animals of a pig resource population revealed 11,457 probe-sets representing genes expressed in the muscle. Linkage analysis of expression levels of these probe-sets provided 9,180 eQTL at the suggestive significance threshold of LOD > 2. We mapped 653 eQTL on the same chromosome as the corresponding gene and these were designated as 'putative cis- eQTL'. In order to link eQTL to the traits of interest, probe-sets were addressed with relative transcript abundances that showed correlation with meat quality traits at p ≤ 0.05. Out of the 653 'putative cis- eQTL', 262 transcripts were correlated with at least one meat quality trait. Furthermore, association of expression levels with composite traits with high loadings for meat quality traits generated by principle component analysis were taken into account leading to a list of 85 genes exhibiting cis- eQTL and trait dependent expression.ConclusionHolistic expression profiling was integrated with QTL analysis for meat quality traits. Correlations between transcript abundance and meat quality traits, combined with genetic positional information of eQTL allowed us to prioritise candidate genes for further study.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Ponsuksili et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to 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.