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This survey’s aim was to investigate the seasonal effect of Fatty acid synthesis (FAS) expression on intramuscular fat (IMF) content in grazing Mongolian, Ujumqin and grain-fed Ujumqin sheep. Different skeletal muscles of sheep (biceps femoris, longissimus dorsi and triceps brachii) were sampled to measure IMF content and total RNA was extracted to determine FAS mRNA expression levels by real-time PCR. The result revealed that: (1) The difference in IMF content in the muscles of Mongolian sheep grazed in summer was observed to be much higher than sheep grazed in winter (p

Simple Summary LncRNAs may play important role in many biological processes. The aims of this research were to identify potential lncRNAs active in skeletal muscle of the Texel and Ujumqin sheep and investigate their functions. Overall, 2002 lncRNA transcripts were found, some of which may be related to muscle development. The findings obtained here should promote understanding of the regulatory functions of lncRNAs in ovine muscle development and potentially also in other mammals. Abstract Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are increasingly being recognized as key regulators in many cellular processes. However, few reports of them in livestock have been published. Here, we describe the identification and characterization of lncRNAs in ovine skeletal muscle. Eight libraries were constructed from the gastrocnemius muscle of fetal (days 85 and 120), newborn and adult Texel and Ujumqin sheep. The 2002 identified transcripts shared some characteristics, such as their number of exons, length and distribution. We also identified some coding genes near these lncRNA transcripts, which are particularly associated with transcriptional regulation- and development-related processes, suggesting that the lncRNAs are associated with muscle development. In addition, in pairwise comparisons between the libraries of the same stage in different breeds, a total of 967 transcripts were differentially expressed but just 15 differentially expressed lncRNAs were common to all stages. Among them, we found that TCONS_00013201 exhibited higher expression in Ujumqin samples, while TCONS_00006187 and TCONS_00083104 were higher in Texel samples. Moreover, TCONS_00044801, TCONS_00008482 and TCONS_00102859 were almost completely absent from Ujumqin samples. Our results suggest that differences in the expression of these lncRNAs may be associated with the muscular differences observed between Texel and Ujumqin sheep breeds.

PCR-RFLP was applied to analyze the polymorphism of MSTN gene UTR in 345 sheep that comprised of eleven sheep breeds, namely Texel sheep, Charolais sheep, Small-tailed Han sheep, Monggolian sheep, Ujumqin sheep, Altay Fat-rumped sheep, Hulunbeir sheep, Tashikurgan sheep, Duolang sheep, Hu sheep, and Gangba sheep. A 271 bp and a 1 003 bp long PCR products were digested with Mboand Bsato demonstrate polymorphism in the eleven sheep breeds, which were all at Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P>0.05). The distribution of 3 genotypes in 11 sheep breeds was significantly different (P

Polymorphisms of the prion protein gene (Prnp), especially the amino acid residue alterations at codons 136, 154, and 174, in sheep have been found to be associated with susceptibility to scrapie disease. We investigated Prnp polymorphisms in three local sheep breeds in Inner Mongolia, China. Blood samples were collected from 46 Ujumqin, 34 Sunite, and 22 Mongolian sheep. The genetic DNA of blood samples was extracted, amplified and sequenced, and amino acid alignment was determined. Polymorphisms were detected at 8 codons, among which M157I, Q220H, and R223K have not been previously reported. The frequency of the amino acid residues ARQ/ARQ at codons 136, 154, and 171, respectively, which is associated with medium-high susceptibility to scrapie, was 74.5%, and the frequency of scrapie-resistant genotype ARR/ARR was 7.9%. The highly susceptible genotype VRQ/VRQ at these codons as not detected from the tested sheep. Of the three sheep breeds, Ujumqin sheep had the highest frequency (15.2%) of scrapie-resistant amino acid sequence, ARR/ARR at codons 136, 154, and 171, respectively, accounting for 87.5% sheep that carry these polymorphisms. Our findings are of special importance for both live sheep export and sheep breeding.