Divergent Gene Expression through PI3K/Akt Signaling Pathway Cause Different Models of Hypertrophy Growth in Chicken

RNA-Seq technology was used to investigate differences in the gene expression of pectoralis muscle tissue between two chicken breeds (Ross as commercial (rapidly growing) and Isfahani as Iranian local breed (slow-growing)). Overall design: Total RNA was isolated from breast muscle samples at end of 4 weeks of age and sequenced by an Illumina Hiseq 2000 sequencer. Hierarchical Indexing for Spliced Alignment of Transcripts (HISAT2) was applied to align clean reads to chicken reference genome. Then, Cufflinks package was used to assemble transcripts and identify significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs).