Designing Mithun Specific Probes Towards Development of Microarray for Mithun (Bos frontalis)

cDNA microarrays are powerful tools to analyze the expression pattern of thousands of genes simultaneously in response to treatments, during tissue differentiation or related to differences in traits. To get accurate results, the probes used in the microarray are to be specific to the species for which the array is being conducted. Non-availability of suitable microarray specific to mithun (Bos frontalis), a rare ruminant of Southeast Asia, limits its use to study the expression patterns of genes globally. Therefore, the authors designed the probes and developed a mithun-specific microarray for the first time. Transcripts obtained from bovine genome array in mithun tissues and from BLAST search were used to design probes and subsequent development of mithun-specific microarray. A total of 3,35,576 numbers of transcripts obtained from the next generation sequencing (through microarray using bovine genome array chips) of mithun tissues including several hundreds of unknown genes and others obtained for BLAST search (11,865) were used for designing the probes towards development of mithun-specific microarrays. A total of 3,47,441 probes were designed and length of each probe was 60 bp. The developed array has total features of 4,20,288, of which 4,16,505 features are readily available in the developed array. Besides, there are 3783 numbers of controls in the array to obtain high performance. In conclusion, the authors developed mithun-specific microarray using probes that are specific to this species for the first time. This microarray for mithun contains fully defined set of genes suitable for detailed analysis of expression of many genes involved in this species. The developed microarray will be of great use to analyze the molecular mechanisms controlling cell proliferation, differentiation in response to different treatments or variation in economic traits such as marbling and disease resistance in mithun. Keywords: Mithun, microarray, cDNA, transcripts, expression, genes Cite this Article Mondal M, Karunakaran M, Baruah KK. Designing mithun specific probes towards development of microarray for mithun (Bos frontalis). Research & Reviews: Journal of Veterinary Science and Technology. 2015; 4(3): 1–7p.