Study on Tibetan Chicken embryonic adaptability to chronic hypoxia by revealing differential gene expression in heart tissue.

Oxygen concentration is essential for appropriate metabolism. Hypoxia can exert a significant impact on physiological alteration of the cell and organism. Tibetan Chicken (Gallus gallus) is a Chinese indigenous breed inhabiting in Tibetan areas, which is also a chicken breed living at high altitude for the longest time in the world. It has developed an adaptive mechanism to hypoxia, which is demonstrated by that Tibetan Chicken has much higher hatchability than low-land chicken breeds in high-altitude areas of Tibet. In the present study, Tibetan Chicken fertilized full sib eggs were incubated up to Hamburger-Hamilton stage 43 under 13% and 21% oxygen concentration, respectively. Shouguang Chicken and Dwarf Recessive White Chicken were used as control groups. The hearts in all of the 3 chicken breeds under hypoxic and normoxic conditions were isolated and hybridized to GeneChip(R) Chicken Genome Array to study molecular mechanisms underlying the adaptation to high altitude of Tibetan Chicken. As a result, 50 transcripts highly expressed in hypoxia are screened out. Among up-regulated genes, some are involved in the gene ontology (GO) such as cell growth, cell difference, muscle contraction and signal transduction. However, the expression levels of 21 transcripts are lower in hypoxia than those in normoxia. Some down-regulated genes take part in cell communication, ion transport, protein amino acid phosphorylation and signal transduction. Interestingly, gene enrichment analyses of these differential gene expressions are mainly associated with immune system response and ion channel activity in response to stimulus. Moreover, the transcriptional expression profiles analyzed by hierarchical clustering and CPP-SOM software in all of the 3 different chicken breeds revealed that Tibetan Chicken is much closely related to Shouguang Chicken rather than Dwarf Recessive White Chicken. In addition, 12 transcripts of Tibetan Chicken breed-specific expressed genes were identified, which seem to result in a more effective and efficient induction of energy demand and signal transduction of transcription and suppression of abnormal development in response to hypoxia. These findings will be beneficial in clarifying the adaptive molecular mechanism of Tibetan Chicken as well as providing new insight into cardiovascular disease at high altitude medicine.