Bioinformatic Analysis of Adipose Tissue Transcriptome of Broiler Chickens

The domestic chicken provides a major protein source from meat and eggs for most human populations throughout the world. Excessive accumulation of lipids in the adipose tissue is a major problem in the present day broiler industry. Adipose tissue is now recognized as a metabolically active endocrine organ and plays an essential role in energy homeostasis. It serves as the major site for lipid deposition and lipid metabolism. The present study is to identify differential expressed (DE) genes in the adipose tissue of the two age groups and to study the functional pathways that these genes are involved in. Chickens were raised and sacrificed at two and eight weeks of age when adipose tissue was collected. RNA was extracted from the tissue samples and was sequenced using Illumina protocols. RNA-seq data were analyzed with CLC genomics workbench. The number of genes that were annotated in the database was 15,916 of which 174 genes were found to be differentially expressed at a false discover rate (FDR) \u3c 0.05 and a fold change of greater than 0.2. Out of the 174 genes, 46 were up-regulated and 128 were down-regulated. Functional analysis showed that DE genes were involved in cell cycle, cellular assembly, DNA replication, recombination, repair, cellular growth/proliferation, and cellular movement pathways