Comprehensive analysis of differentially expressed mRNA, circRNA and miRNA and their ceRNA networks in testis of cattle-yak, yak and cattle

Cattle-yak is the hybrid offspring of yak and cattle. It has obvious heterosis in production performance, but the male sterility of cattle-yak has always been the focus of attention. Studies have shown that non-coding RNA is involved in the regulation of spermatogenesis. We comprehensively compared the testicular transcription profiles of cattle, yak and cattle-yak. More DEGs, DECs and DEMs were found in the intersection of the two comparison groups of cattle and cattle-yak, yak and cattle-yak, with 4,968, 360 and 59, respectively. The DEGs of cattle-yak, cattle and yak were mainly enriched in biological processes such as spermatogenesis, male gamete generation and sexual reproduction. At the same time, GO and KEGG analysis suggested that DECs host genes and DEMs source genes were also involved in the regulation of spermatogenesis. The construction of potential ceRNA networks found that some differentially expressed ncRNAs may be involved in the regulation of genes related to testicular spermatogenesis, including miR-423-5p, miR-449b, miR-34b/c, miR-15b, etc., as well as unreported miR-6123, miR-1306 and some miRNA and circRNA interaction pairs. This study provides a reference for further study on the mechanism of male sterility in cattle-yak. Overall design: Testes of adult cattle, yaks and cattle-yaks were sequenced by whole-transcription