Interactome mapping reveals important pathways in skeletal muscle development of pigs

The regulatory relationship and connectivity among genes involved in myogenesis and hypertrophy of skeletal muscle in pigs still remain large challenges. Presentation of gene interactions is a potential way to understand the mechanisms of developmental events in skeletal muscle. In this study, genome-wide transcripts and miRNA profiling was determined for Landrace pigs at four time points using microarray chips. A comprehensive method integrating gene ontology annotation and interactome network mapping was conducted to analyze the biological patterns and interaction modules of muscle development events based on differentially expressed genes and miRNAs. Our results showed that in total 484 genes and 34 miRNAs were detected for the duration from embryonic stage to adult in pigs, which composed two linear expression patterns with consensus changes. Moreover, the gene ontology analysis also disclosed that there were three typical biological events i.e., microstructure assembly of sarcomere at early embryonic stage, myofibril formation at later embryonic stage and function establishments of myoblast cells at postnatal stage. The interactome mappings of different time points also found the down-regulated trend of gene expression existed across the whole duration, which brought a possibility to introduce the myogenesis related miRNAs into the interactome regulatory networks of skeletal muscle in pigs.