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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Animal Biosciences & Biotechnology Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #338757
Research Project: Non-antibiotic Strategies to Control Enteric Diseases of Poultry

Location: Animal Biosciences & Biotechnology Laboratory

Title: Intestinal meta-transcriptome comparison reveals disparate antiviral transcriptional response and its association with Mitochondria in chicken immunity development

Author
item Li, Charles
item Yan, Xianghe
item Lillehoj, Hyun

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/2/2017
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Background: Availability of a large number of data sets in public repositories and the advances in integrating multi-omics methods have greatly advanced our understanding of biological organisms and microbial associates, as well as large subcellular organelles, such as mitochondria. Mitochondrial organelles have an important role for understanding antibiotic-host interactions and cellular immune response development. Here, we collected publicly available data sets of intestinal microbial community transcriptomic profiling of healthy broiler chickens from hatch to market age as well as from their hens in order to investigate several important antiviral/antibacterial genes from the mitochondria and host change. Results and conclusion: Breeder source influenced the mitochondrial gene expression only at hatch, with no statistically significant effect on the gene expression at 2 weeks. After 4 weeks (4w), there was a significant variation in mitochondrial gene expression between the monitored and control flocks. At hatch, cytochrome c oxidase subunit (cox-1 and cox-3), the main subunit of cytochrome c oxidase complexes, was expressed at significantly higher rates than at 2 weeks (2w), but NADH dehydrogenase subunit 6 (ND6) was lower. The significant change of cox-1 gene expression among samples of 4w-c1, 4w-c3, 4w-c4, 6w-c1, and 6w-c4 (for individual chickens in the control groups at 4-weeks or 6-week age) may contribute to the structural changes of cox-1 gene with age. For hens, the most up-regulated immune response transcripts included: linker protein for immunoglobulin and µ polypeptides precursor (IGJ, NP_989594), polymeric immunoglobulin receptor precursor (PIGR, NP_001038109), and immunoglobulin-like receptor (CHIR-IG1-5, NM_001031331). While the most down-regulated immune-response transcripts detected for hens were:leucine rich repeat and Ig domain containing 1 (LINGO1, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot: Q50L44) and CDC42 effector protein (CDC42EP1,HGNC:17014). Whereas for chicks at hatch, toll-like receptor 21 (TLR21) and late endosomal/lysosomal adaptor MAPK and MTOR activator 2 (LAMTOR2) were the most up-regulated immune-response genes. In this study, several important antimicrobial genes in chicken mitochondria were identified in correlation with immune-response gene transcripts, such as MavS, a mitochondrial antiviral-signaling protein. Our analysis also identified that the antiviral response is present in chickens during their early development as we detected induction of host immune response genes at hatching in the meta-transcriptome samples. These data provide new knowledge to support an age-based strategy for viral attenuation and vaccine development in poultry.