Molecular characterization,transcriptional regulation and association analysis with carcass traits of porcine TCAP gene

TCAP (also known as titin-cap or telethonin) is one of the titin interacting Z-disk proteins involved in the regulation and development of normal sarcomeric structure. In this study, we cloned the cDNA and promoter sequences of porcine TCAP gene, which contained a 504 bp full-length coding region. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) analyses showed that porcine TCAP was highly expressed in the skeletal muscle, heart, and kidney. During postnatal muscle development, TCAP expression was down-regulated from 30 days to 120 days in Large White and Meishan pigs. One single nucleotide polymorphism c.334G>A in exon 2 of the TCAP gene was identified and detected by allele-specific primer-polymerase chain reaction (ASP-PCR). Association analysis revealed that the polymorphism had significant associations (P < 0.05 and P < 0.01) with some carcass traits. Analysis of the porcine TCAP promoter in different cell lines demonstrated that it is a muscle-specific promoter. In addition, we found that the porcine TCAP promoter can be activated by MyoD, MyoG and MEF2 in myotubes, which indicated that TCAP may play a role in the regulation of porcine skeletal muscle development. These findings provide useful information for the further investigation of the function of TCAP in porcine skeletal muscle.