Functional analysis of miRNA-146b during myotube differentiation in chicken myoblasts

Abstract

In poultry industry as well as livestock, the precise genetic information is being required for improving the economic traits. Thus, functional genomic studies are widely conducted to build the genetic and genomic information for faster, healthier and more-efficient animal production. Especially, chicken myoblast cells which are required to muscle development and regeneration are important because chicken growth performance is closely related to muscle mass. In this study, we induced expression of microRNA-146b (miR-146b) mediated by piggyBac transposon system in chicken myoblast (pCM cells). Subsequently, we analyzed and compared the proliferation and differentiation capacity, and also examined the expression patterns of related genes between regular pCM (rpCM) cells and miR-146b overexpressing pCM (pCM-146b OE) cells. The overexpression of miR-146b showed that the increased proliferation and up-regulated gene expression related to cell proliferation. In addition, the next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis were performed to compare the global gene expression patterns between rpCM cells and pCM-146b OE cells. We found that the higher proliferation rate of pCM-146b OE cells resulted from up-regulation of the cell cycle related gene sets. Moreover, miR-146b overexpression indicated that inhibitory effect of myotube differentiation in chicken myoblast cells. Collectively, these results demonstrated that miR-146b is closely related to proliferation and differentiation of chicken myogenic cells as a modulator of post-transcription.