Jianbo Li¹ , Baizhong Zhang¹ , Fang He¹ , Cheng Huan¹ , Yang Luo¹ , Sheng Li¹ , Wenjie Cai¹ , Baixin Wu¹ , Fuqiang Li² , Kangle Yi¹

1 Hunan Institute of Animal and Veterinary Science, Changsha, 410130;
2 Hunan Tianhua Industry Co., Ltd., Loudi, 417100
Author    Correspondence author
Animal Molecular Breeding, 2022, Vol. 12, No. 1   
Received: 14 Oct., 2022    Accepted: 27 Oct., 2022    Published: 09 Nov., 2022

This article was first published in Genomics and Applied Biology in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The sexual maturity of beef cattle is regulated by the hypothalamus-pituitary-ovary (HPO) axis, but its specific mechanism is not clear. To explore the HPO-axis reproduction related genes and regulatory mechanisms, the hypothalamus, pituitary and ovary of adult Angus cattle (30 months of age) were studied by applying high-through- put transcriptome RNA-seq techniques. The results showed that the HPO had a total of 18 179 genes annotated in GO (Gene Ontology), 37 158 genes annotated in KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genome), or 36 645 genes annotated in KOG (KEGG Ortholog database), respectively. GO analysis revealed that the HPO enriched eight kinds of reproduction related functions, mainly were fertilization, reproduction process of single tissue, embryonic devel- opment in uterus, and estrogen response. KEGG analysis found that the HPO enriched 300 signaling pathways (SPs), mainly cancer SP and phosphatidylinositol 3 kinase protein kinase (PI3K-Akt) SP. There were a total of 16 SPs related to reproduction, mainly Notch SP, Neurotrophin SP, Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) SP, and Vas- cular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) SP. It provided a scientific basis for future beef cattle improvement of re- productive performance, molecular breeding and peer reference.

Cattle; HPO-axis; RNA-seq; Gene; Signalingpathways