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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Animal Biosciences & Biotechnology Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #322240
Title: Impact of broiler egg storage on the relative expression of selected blastoderm genes associated with apoptosis, oxidative stress, and fatty acid metabolism

Author
item Bakst, Murray
item Welch, Glenn
item Fetterer, Raymond
item Miska, Kate

Submitted to: Poultry Science
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/16/2016
Publication Date: 6/1/2016
Citation: Bakst, M.R., Welch, G.R., Fetterer, R.H., Miska, K.B. 2016. Impact of broiler egg storage on the relative expression of selected blastoderm genes associated with apoptosis, oxidative stress, and fatty acid metabolism. Poultry Science. 95(6):1411-1417. doi: 10.3382/ps/pew038.

Interpretive Summary: Cool temperature storage of eggs prior to incubation is a frequent practice by commercial broiler hatcheries. However, continued storage beyond 7 days leads to a progressively increase in the rate of early embryonic mortality. In this study, we described changes in how specific genes are expressed by the chicken embryo as a result of cool egg storage for 3 weeks. The results showed that only embryonic genes associated with fat metabolism increased during egg storage. Other genes associated with cell stress and cell death had more variable results. It was also shown for the first time that some of the specific genes examined in this study were only highly expressed when the embryo was at a more advanced stage of development. This work will serve as the basis for a larger study examining changes in the expression of all embryonic genes at the time of incubation before and after eggs storage. This information is useful to poultry scientists involved in incubation research and supervisors at commercial hatcheries.

Technical Abstract: Cool temperature storage of eggs prior to incubation is a frequent practice by commercial broiler hatcheries. However, continued storage beyond 7 days leads to a progressively increase in the rate of early embryonic mortality. In this study, we examined the relative expression of 31 genes associated with fatty acid metabolism (8), apoptosis (7), and oxidative stress (16) pathways to better understand the basis of embryo mortality during egg storage. RNA was extracted from embryos isolated from eggs stored for 4 days (C1), eggs stored for 21 days (NS), and eggs stored for 21 days but subjected to three, 4 hr preincubation periods (37oC) on days 6, 12, and 18 of storage (SPIDES). An additional treatment, C2, consisted of 4 day stored eggs that were incubated for 10 hr to advance the embryos to the same developmental stage as the SPIDES embryos. Analysis of gene expression was performed using qRT-PCR and the results presented as the relative expression of C1. The relative expression of genes in which the SPIDES and C2 treatments were significantly up- or down-regulated in tandem indicated that the stage-specific expression of those genes was maintained by the SPIDES treatment. On-going work includes analysis of the transcriptomes of the 4 egg treatments used in this study.