A structural variant in the 5’-flanking region of the <i>TWIST2</i> gene affects melanocyte development in belted cattle
by Nivedita Awasthi Mishra, Cord Drögemüller, Vidhya Jagannathan, Irene Keller, Daniel Wüthrich, Rémy Bruggmann, Julia Beck, Ekkehard Schütz, Bertram Brenig, Steffi Demmel, Simon Moser, Heidi Signer-Hasler, Aldona Pieńkowska-Schelling, Claude Schelling, Marcos Sande, Ronald Rongen, Stefan Rieder, Robert N. Kelsh, Nadia Mercader, Tosso Leeb
Belted cattle have a circular belt of unpigmented hair and skin around their midsection. The belt is inherited as a monogenic autosomal dominant trait. We mapped the causative variant to a 37 kb segment on bovine chromosome 3. Whole genome sequence data of 2 belted and 130 control cattle yielded only one private genetic variant in the critical interval in the two belted animals. The belt-associated variant was a copy number variant (CNV) involving the quadruplication of a 6 kb non-coding sequence located approximately 16 kb upstream of the TWIST2 gene. Increased copy numbers at this CNV were strongly associated with the belt phenotype in a cohort of 333 cases and 1322 controls. We hypothesized that the CNV causes aberrant expression of TWIST2 during neural crest development, which might negatively affect melanoblasts. Functional studies showed that ectopic expression of bovine TWIST2 in neural crest in transgenic zebrafish led to a decrease in melanocyte numbers. Our results thus implicate an unsuspected involvement of TWIST2 in regulating pigmentation and reveal a non-coding CNV underlying a captivating Mendelian character.Publisher URL: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180170
Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.
Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.