Discovery of two potential DAZL gene markers for sperm quality in boars by population association studies

Preservation of boar semen: An update

“…Proteomics and genomics have made it possible to identify markers that act as indicators of the behaviour that a certain individual will have in the event of freezing, because the evaluation made regarding the quality of semen is not always a good indicator of fertility and reproductive output in boars. Determining those more precise and predictive genetic and protein markers will enable the exclusion of those boars with reduced reproductive efficiency (Ma et al, ). In the proteomics of seminal plasma, 536 proteins were identified, of which 20 may be involved in reproductive processes and 34 proteins are expressed differentially in the different fractions of the ejaculate.…”

“…The gene linked to azoospermia (DAZL) participates in the formation of germinal cells during spermatogenesis, the appearance of two polymorphisms, and positions them as genetic markers associated with sperm motility and concentration in different pig breeds: Duroc, Large White and Landrace (Ma et al, ). The CD9 gene was evaluated as a candidate gene for the quality of boar semen, expressed in germinal stem cells and crucial to sperm–ovum fusion, using protein and mRNA expression profiles.…”

Exploiting RNA-sequencing data from the porcine testes to identify the key genes involved in spermatogenesis in Large White pigs

“…Both additive and dominance effects were also estimated using regression (REG) procedure. The model: Y ij = μ + genotype i + farm j + e ij , where Y ij is the observation of semen quality trait, μ is the overall population mean; genotype i is the fixed effect of the ith genotype (i = 1, 2 and 3); farm j is the fixed effect of the jth farm (j = 1, 2); and e ij is the random residual (Ma et al, 2013).…”

“…A single-SNP genomewide association study detected six significant SNPs on SSC1 (position 117.26-119.56Mb) in animals from a Large White-based pig population (Diniz et al, 2014). Candidate gene approach was also used to identify the genetic markers for semen quality, such as deleted in azoospermialike (DAZL) (Ma et al, 2013) and phosphoglycerate kinase 2 (PGK2) gene (Chen et al, 2004). Presently, RNA-Seq provided an efficient means to identify 19,996 and 15,964 genetic variations in the expressed portion of the genome from testes of 60-d and 180-d pigs compared with the reference genome, respectively.…”

miR-762 promotes porcine immature Sertoli cell growth via the ring finger protein 4 (RNF4) gene

“…A primer pair (RNF4-SNP-PF and RNF4-SNP-PR, Supplementary Table S3) was used to amplify a specific fragment of RNF4 3′UTR, the restriction enzyme Mbi I (Thermo Scientific, Waltham, MA, USA) was used to digest the PCR products, and the digested products were separated by electrophoresis on a 2% agarose gel. Population association analysis was performed as previously described37. Briefly, the relationships between genotypes and sperm quality traits were assessed using the general linear model (GLM) procedure of SAS version 9.2, and the additive and dominance effects were estimated using the REG procedure of SAS version 9.2.…”