Identification of Three Novel Splicing Variants and Expression Analysis of Chicken GPR1 Gene

Abstract

GPR1is a G protein-coupled receptor that plays critical roles in eukaryotic cells: typically, response to glucose stimulation, lipid accumulation, and transmitting nutrition signals to cAMP pathway. However, the alternative splicing of theGPR1gene and its expression pattern in chicken tissues and ovarian follicles were unknown. In our current study, we used RACE-PCR to identify threeGPR1variants, including the full-length variant (GPR1-va1) and two alternatively spliced variants (GPR1-va2,GPR1-vb). Quantitative real-time PCR examined the expression pattern ofGPR1mRNA in chicken tissues and ovarian follicles. The result reveals that the coding sequence of the three variants cDNA is 1053, 1053, and 627 bp in length, encoding 350, 350, and 208 amino acids, respectively. The three variants ofGPR1show similar tissue distributions;GPR1expression was abundant in the abdominal fat, lung, and heart. With the follicular development, the expression ofGPR1gene gradually increased, andGPR1-va1andGPR1-va2spliced variants expression in F2 were significantly higher than in F5, F4, and prehierarchical follicles (P<0.05). Taken together, we found three novel variants ofGPR1, and the results ofGPR1expression profiling in adipose tissues and ovarian follicles suggest thatGPR1may play a significant role in the lipid accumulation and progression of follicular development.