An imprinted long noncoding RNA located between genes Meg8 and Meg9 in the cattle Dlk1-Dio3 domain

The Dlk1-Dio3 imprinted domain is located on the cattle chromosome 21 and contains three paternally expressed protein-coding genes and a number of maternally expressed short or long noncoding RNA genes. We have previously obtained two maternally expressed long noncoding RNA genes, Meg8 and Meg9, from the cattle. In this study, we identified a novel noncoding RNA located between Meg8 and Meg9 known as LINC24061 according to the GENCODE annotated bibliography. Two alternatively spliced transcripts (LINC24061-v1 and LINC24061-v2) were obtained using RT-PCR and RACE, and the expression pattern of LINC24061-v1 and LINC24061-v2 was shown to be tissue-specific. The LINC24061-v1 splice variant was expressed in only three types of tissues: heart, kidney and muscle; in contrast, LINC24061-v2 was expressed in all eight tissues examined, including heart, liver, spleen, lung, kidney, skeletal muscle, subcutaneous fat, and brain of adult cattle. The allele-specific expression of LINC24061 was identified based on a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in exon 2 of LINC24061. The results showed that LINC24061 exhibited monoallelic expression in all the examined cattle tissues.