Carcass weight, meat quality and muscle components are important traits economically and they underpin most of the commercial return to goat producers. In this study, the
muscle tissues were ...collected from five Liaoning cashmere (LC) goats and five Ziwuling black (ZB) goats with phenotypic difference in carcass weight, some meat quality traits and muscle components. The histological quantitative of collagen fibers and the transcriptome profiles in the
muscle tissues were investigated using Masson-trichrome staining and RNA-Seq, respectively. The percentage of total collagen fibers in the
muscle tissues from ZB goats was less than those from LC goats, suggesting that these ZB goats had more tender meat. An average of 15,919 and 15,582 genes were found to be expressed in
muscle tissues from LC and ZB goats, respectively. Compared to LC goats, the expression levels of 78 genes were up-regulated in ZB goats, while 133 genes were down-regulated. Gene ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analyses revealed that the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were significantly enriched in GO terms related to the muscle growth and development and the deposition of intramuscular fat and lipid metabolism, hippo signaling pathway and Jak-STAT signaling pathway. The results provide an improved understanding of the genetic mechanisms regulating meat production performance in goats, and will help us improve the accuracy of selection for meat traits in goats using marker-assisted selection based on these differentially expressed genes obtained.
Tibetan sheep is one of the dominant livestock at Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which is the main food source of local people. In order to investigate the effect of slaughter age on meat quality, fatty acid ...profile and expression of myosin heavy chain (MyHC) isoform genes were analyzed in Tibetan sheep. A total of 24 Tibetan sheep including 4 months old (4 m), 1.5 years old (1.5 y), 3.5 years old (3.5 y), and 6 years old (6 y) were randomly selected. The results indicated that the MyHC IIx and MyHC IIb mRNAs increased with age, whereas MyHC IIa mRNA decreased. MyHC I mRNA was highest at 3.5 y. There were differences in the muscle fiber types of Tibetan sheep at different ages. Intramuscular fat (IMF) was highest at 1.5 y, the pH
45min
and pH
24h
value of 6 y sheep were lower than the other groups, the shear force increased with age (
p
< 0.05), and drip loss increased with age (
p
< 0.01). Tibetan sheep at 1.5 y had lower saturated fatty acid (SFA) contents and higher monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA) contents (
p
< 0.05). Different muscle fiber types influence the meat quality and fatty acid composition of Tibetan sheep with increasing age. These results demonstrated the effect of age on meat quality of Tibetan sheep through regulation of expression of the MyHC isoforms which changed the myofiber types, and 1.5 y Tibetan sheep meat was more suitable for a healthy human diet.
Changes in keratin gene expression and spatiotemporal regulation determine the compositional content and cellular localization of wool keratin, thereby affecting wool traits. Therefore, keratin gene ...family member 32 (
) was selected for a study using RT-qPCR, immunofluorescence, and penta-primer amplification refractory mutation system (PARMS) techniques. The results showed that
mRNA was highly expressed in the skin and localized to the inner root sheath (IRS), outer root sheath (ORS) and dermal papilla (DP). Sequencing results identified eight SNPs in
, and association analyses revealed that the variations were significantly associated with multiple traits in wool (
< 0.05), including MFD, CF and MFC. The constructed haplotype combination
has higher CF and smaller MFD than other haplotype combination (
< 0.05). In conclusion,
can be used as a candidate gene for molecular genetic improvement of wool in Gansu Alpine Fine-wool sheep.
Keratin-related proteins (KAPs) are structural components of wool fibers and are thought to play a key role in regulating the physical and mechanical properties of fibers. Among all KAP genes (
),
...gene family (
,
,
,
, and
) is a very important member with high polymorphism and notable association with some wool traits. In this study, we used real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) and in situ hybridization to investigate spatiotemporal expression of
. The results revealed that
family genes were significantly expressed during anagen compared to other stages (
< 0.05). And it was found the five genes were expressed predominantly in the dermal papillae, inner and outer root sheaths, and showed a distinct spatiotemporal expression pattern. Also, it was found that
and
mRNA expression was negatively correlated with wool mean fiber diameter (MFD) and mean staple strength (MSS) (
< 0.05). In summary, the
family genes share a similar spatiotemporal expression pattern. And
and
may regulate the MFD and MSS of Gansu Alpine fine-wool sheep wool by changing the expression.
The hardware security of embedded systems is raising more and more concerns in numerous safety-critical applications, such as in the automotive, aerospace, avionic, and railway systems. Embedded ...systems are gaining popularity in these safety-sensitive sectors with high performance, low power, and great reliability, which are ideal control platforms for executing instruction operation and data processing. However, modern embedded systems are still exposing many potential hardware vulnerabilities to malicious attacks, including software-level and hardware-level attacks; these can cause program execution failure and confidential data leakage. For this reason, this paper presents a novel embedded system by integrating a hardware-assisted security monitoring unit (SMU), for achieving a reinforced system-on-chip (SoC) on ensuring program execution and data processing security. This architecture design was implemented and evaluated on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA development board. Based on the evaluation of the SMU hardware implementation in terms of performance overhead, security capability, and resource consumption, the experimental results indicate that the SMU does not lead to a significant speed degradation to processor while executing different benchmarks, and its average performance overhead reduces to 2.18% on typical 8-KB I/D-Caches. Security capability evaluation confirms the monitoring effectiveness of SMU against both instruction and data tampering attacks. Meanwhile, the SoC satisfies a good balance between high-security and resource overhead.
Defective enzymes, cofactors, or transporters of metabolic pathways cause inherited metabolic disorders (IMDs), a group of genetic disorders. Several IMDs have serious consequences for the affected ...neonates. Newborn screening for IMDs is conducted by measuring specific metabolites between 3 and 7 days of life. Herein, we analyzed the incidence, spectrum, and genetic characteristics of IMDs in newborns in the Zhuzhou area.
Tandem mass spectrometry was conducted on 90,829 newborns who were admitted to the Women and Children Healthcare Hospital of Zhuzhou and requested for screening for IMDs. These newborns were subsequently subjected to next-generation sequencing and further validated using Sanger sequencing.
30 IMDs cases were found in 90,829 cases of newborns screened for IMDs, and the overall incidence was 1/3,027. The incidence of amino acid, organic acid, fatty acid oxidation and urea cycle disorders were 1/8,257, 1/18,165, 1/7,569, and 1/45,414, respectively. Additionally, 9 cases of maternal IMDs were found in our study, and unreported gene mutations of 3 cases IMDs were identified.
Our data indicated that IMDs are never uncommon in zhuzhou, meanwhile, we also found that primary carnitine deficiency was the only disorder of fatty acid oxidation in Zhuzhou, and the incidence (1/7,569) was higher than the national level, organic acid metabolic diseases are mostly inherited. Therefore, our study has clarified the disease spectrum and genetic backgrounds, contributing to the treatment and prenatal genetic counseling of these disorders in this region.
Keratin-associated proteins (KAPs) are structural components of wool fibres. High-glycine/tyrosine (HGT)-KAPs are a subset of the KAP family, and their abundance in fibres varies. In this study, we ...report the discovery of an ovine HGT-KAP gene to which we assigned the name KRTAP36-2. Polymerase chain reaction and single-strand conformation polymorphism (PCR-SSCP) analyses revealed four variants of this gene in a screening population of 170 sheep from a variety of breeds. The DNA sequencing of the variants revealed four single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and a dinucleotide deletion. Three of these SNPs were in the coding region, and one of these was non-synonymous and potentially led to the amino acid substitution p.Cys27Gly near the middle of the protein. The remaining SNP was located near the putative TATA box, and the di-nucleotide deletion was near the putative transcription initiation site. The effect of this variation in KRTAP36-2 was investigated in 274 Southdown × Merino lambs that were the progeny of five sires. Variation was only found to be associated with wool yield, that is, the proportion of the greasy fleece that remained as clean fleece upon scouring (expressed as a percentage). This may have some value in increasing wool production.
Salt and osmotic stress seriously restrict the growth, development, and productivity of horticultural crops in the greenhouse. The papain-like cysteine proteases (PLCPs) participate in multi-stress ...responses in plants. We previously demonstrated that salt and osmotic stress affect cysteine protease 15 of pepper (
L.) (
); however, the role of
in salt and osmotic stress responses is unknown. Here, the function of
in regulating pepper salt and osmotic stress resistance was explored. Pepper plants were subjected to abiotic (sodium chloride, mannitol, salicylic acid, ethrel, methyl jasmonate, etc.) and biotic stress (
inoculation). The
was silenced through the virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) and transiently overexpressed in pepper plants. The full-length
fragment is 1568 bp, with an open reading frame of 1032 bp, encoding a 343 amino acid protein. CaCP15 is a senescence-associated gene 12 (SAG12) subfamily member containing two highly conserved domains, Inhibitor 129 and Peptidase_C1.
expression was the highest in the stems of pepper plants. The expression was induced by salicylic acid, ethrel, methyl jasmonate, and was infected by
inoculation. Furthermore,
was upregulated under salt and osmotic stress, and
silencing in pepper enhanced salt and mannitol stress resistance. Conversely, transient overexpression of
increased the sensitivity to salt and osmotic stress by reducing the antioxidant enzyme activities and negatively regulating the stress-related genes. This study indicates that
negatively regulates salt and osmotic stress resistance in pepper via the ROS-scavenging.
To better control drug delivery rate, a simple and effective approach has been developed for controlled drug delivery carrier system through one-step surface modification of the ibuprofen-impregnated ...silica MCM-41 with 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3-hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS). The
29Si MAS NMR characterization demonstrated that different contents of trimethylsilyl (TMS) groups were successfully grafted onto the samples modified with different silylation times. The results obtained from in vitro tests exhibited that the introduction of TMS groups greatly retarded the ibuprofen release rate. Even after in vitro test for 48 h, only 75% of the impregnated ibuprofen could be released from the modified sample with TMS groups content of 14.5% (related to the total silicon atoms). However, the release of ibuprofen could be completed just after about 1 h from the pure silica MCM-41 under the same release conditions. Furthermore, the release rate of ibuprofen could be well modulated by changing the grafted content of TMS groups, and was found to decrease with increasing grafted amount of TMS groups.
The importance of sheep's wool in making textiles has inspired extensive research into its structure and the underlying genetics since the 1960s. Wool keratin-associated proteins (KAPs) are a key ...structural component of the wool fibre. The characterisation of the genes encoding these proteins has progressed rapidly with advances in the nucleotide and protein sequencing. This review describes our knowledge of ovine KAPs, their categorisation into families, polymorphism in the proteins and genes, the clustering and chromosomal location of the genes, some characteristics of gene expression and some potential effects of the KAPs on wool traits. The extent and nature of genetic variation in wool KAP genes and its association with fibre characteristics, provides an opportunity for the development of gene-markers for selective breeding of sheep to produce better wool with properties highly matched to specific end-uses.
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