Peripheral blood leukocytes transcriptomic signature highlights the altered metabolic pathways by heat stress in zebu cattle.

High temperature during summer greatly affects animal production due to altered reproductive and metabolic functions. However, information regarding high throughput analysis of change in gene expression in diary animals are relatively nil. In present study, gene expression profiling by microarray was done in peripheral blood leukocytes of heat exposed (42 °C, 4h) cattle (n=3), Tharparkar (Bos indicus). A total 460 transcripts were differentially expressed with a fold change of ⩾ 2. Randomly selected real-time validation showed that 73.08% correlation with microarray data. Functional annotation and pathway study of the DEGs reveals that, up-regulated genes significantly (P<0.05) affect the protein processing and NOD like receptor pathways, while down regulated genes were significantly (P<0.05) found to associated with Glycolytic pathways. In conclusion, the present study showed that heat stress affects expression of significant number of genes in peripheral blood leukocytes and further analysis is required to understand their functional role in livestock.