Keloid disease is a fibro proliferative skin tumor and occurs after a skin trauma in genetically vulnerable individuals. Etiology of keloid is unclear. Causative factors for keloid are increased familial aggregation, a higher prevalence in certain races, parallelism in identical twins, and alteration in gene expression. It appears that the surroundings activate the disease in genetically susceptible individuals. Several genes are considered responsible for keloid disease, but no single gene mutation has thus far been found to be responsible. Therefore, we should apply a combination of methods such as association, gene-gene interaction, epigenetics, linkage, gene expression, and protein analysis to find out the keloid etiology. Incidence of familial keloid is common in Africans but is uncommon in Indian population. It may be due to autosomal dominant or autosomal recessive inheritance.

Background: Forebrain embryonic zinc finger-like (FEZL) gene is an important candidate associated with mastitis resistance in dairy cattle. FEZL is involved in transcriptional regulation of neuronal development and there exists a crosstalk between neuronal development and immunity via downstream cytokine expression. A single glycine insertion into glycine stretch of FEZL gene has large effect on downstream cytokine pathway making the cows susceptible to mastitis. The present study was aimed to sequence characterize FEZL gene in Sahiwal (Bos indicus) and Karan Fries (Bos inidcus X Bos taurus) cattle.Methods: Sequence characterization of bovine FEZL gene was carried out by primer walking method. Ten sets of oligonucleotide primers were designed to synthesize overlapping fragments and generate the complete sequence of about 3.7 kb covering all exons and 5’ upstream regulatory and flanking regions.Result: A total of eight nucleotide variations including three INDELS and five substitution mutations were observed among FEZL gene sequences of Bos taurus, Bos indicus (Sahiwal) and Bos taurus X Bos indicus (Karan Fries) cattle. The conceptualized amino acid sequence of bovine FEZL gene in Sahiwal and Karan Fries cattle was found to have 13 tandem Glycine residues and a serine to proline change within exon 1 region. The percent identity of FEZL gene of Sahiwal and Karan Fries cattle was 99% with that of Bos taurus, 95% with dog, horse and pig, 94% with human, 93% with rabbit, 92% with marmoset, 89% with rat and 79% with chicken. Sequence characterization of ~0.7 kb 5’ flanking region showed that it is highly conserved among bovines and resulted in prediction of six putative sites for binding of transcription factors (including Elk-1, Oct-1, HNF4, Lmo2 complex, GATA-3 and Nkx2-5). Elucidation of Bos indicus FEZL gene will further form the basis to identify candidate gene markers for association with mastitis resistance/susceptibility in cattle.