A Novel Regulator of Preadipocyte Differentiation, Transcription Factor TCF21, Functions Partially Through Promoting LPL Expression

Discussion Excessive fat deposition in chickens can result in many undesirable consequences within the poultry industry, including reduced feeding efficiency (Zhou et al., 2006) and decreased reproductive performance (Walzem and Chen, 2014). Thus, broiler breeders urgently require a more thorough understanding of the molecular mechanism governing chicken adipogenesis. We previously found that broilers from lean and fat lines exhibit clear differences in reproductive performance (Zhang et al., 2018). In addition, TCF21 was found to be related to testis growth and development in these broilers (Zhang et al., 2017). In mice and humans, TCF21 has been reported to not only influence reproduction (Bhandari et al., 2012), but to also regulate the development of white adipose tissue (Timmoms et al., 2007; Petrovic et al., 2010). Therefore, we sought to investigate whether TCF21 plays a similar role in regulating chicken preadipocyte differentiation. First, we first compared TCF21 expression in the adipose tissue of lean and fat chickens from 1 to 7 weeks of age. We found that, similar to prior findings in the visceral adipose tissue of normal and obese Uygurs (Zhang et al., 2015), both TCF21 mRNA and protein expression levels were significantly higher in the abdominal adipose tissue of fat relative to lean birds. In addition, TCF21 mRNA and protein levels were markedly higher in mature chicken adipocytes relative to preadipocytes in vivo, and TCF21 expression had an increasing tren...
Source: Frontiers in Physiology - Category: Physiology Source Type: research