Molecular Characterization of Differentially Expressed Genes in Porcine Leukocytes Due to Transport Stress

Reduction of stressors is an important goal in modern husbandry in order to improve economics of animal production, product quality, and animal welfare aspects. Therefore transport stress is one of the problems in pig production. Stress is the reaction of the body to a stimulus, which disturbs the normal homeostasis, physiological, and biochemical activities of an animal. The genetic events of stress in animals are not yet completely understood. Hence, the objective of this study is to identify candidate genes which are differentially expressed under transport stress. Three groups of German Landrace pigs were either transported for 3 h or treated with Myostress to introduce pharmacological stress or kept as non-treated control. Blood samples were taken from each experimental pig just before treatment, directly after treatment, one day, and three days after treatment and used to measure liver and muscle enzyme serum concentration. RNA from leucocytes obtained from animals before and after transport were analyzed using Differential display (DDRT-PCR). DDRT-PCR was applied for expression profiling with high and low cortisone response animals. From 26 arbitary primers in combination with 2 anchored primers namely oligo T12VG and T12VC, 5 non-shared bands, were reamplified and cloned. Two of the ESTs detected here are homologous to genes that are likely to be involved in cell proliferation. Therefore one might speculate that there is evidence for a functional relationship between the genes identified as candidate genes for stress susceptibility/tolerance and physiological processes that take place due to stress. This has been the first study to identify specific genes associated with stress due to transport in pigs by using molecular biology technique.