CircRNA as CeRNA mediated by microRNA may be involved in goat lactation

Abstract

Abstract The main function of the mammary gland is to produce milk which contains the crucial active components for infant development. The process of milk production is tightly controlled at a local level by hormones, growth factors, noncoding RNAs and other factors. Circular RNAs (CircRNAs) are specifically expressed across tissues or developmental stages where they have potential regulatory functions. Competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs), sharing miRNA recognition elements (MREs), emerge to compete for miRNA binding and, in turn, regulate each other. Although circRNAs have been determined in rat and bovine mammary glands during lactation, these studies simply investigated the expression of circRNAs in the mammary gland with no exploration of ceRNAs of circRNA-mRNA. In the current study, mRNA, miRNA and circRNA were sequenced in goat mammary tissue at 2 stages during lactation (early and mature). All data (mRNA, miRNA, and circRNA) were co-expressed together from the same samples. ceRNAs (mRNA-miRNA-circRNA) were found to be involved in goat lactation. Therefore the findings of the current investigation suggest a novel approach through the application of a ceRNA network (mRNA-miRNA-circRNA) for the analysis of gene functionality in biological processes such as lactation.