Regulatory Gene Network for Taste Sensory in Pig

The taste system senses the nutritional quality of foods through a network of taste sensory cells that, in turn, will play a fundamental role on the mediation of food choices in animals. Therefore, taste sensing in livestock animal has not only evolved to detect nutrients and assess the quality of edible foods, but also may significantly affect to economically valuable traits such as feed intake and quality performances. The current consensus is that the taste sensations can be divided into at least five qualities: bitter, sour, salty, sweet, and umami. The first porcine taste receptor genes identified, sequenced and characterized were related to the dimeric receptor for umami taste: Tas1r1 and Tas1r3. However, little is known about their regulatory network. The objective of the present study is to unfold the genetic network involved in the porcine umami taste perception. We performed a meta-analysis of 20 gene expression studies spanning 480 porcine microarray chips and screened 328 taste related genes by selective mining steps among the available 12,320 genes. A porcine umami taste specific regulatory network was constructed based on the normalized co-expression data of the 328 genes across 27 tissues. Based the regulatory network, we revealed the “Taste Module” and identified a co-expression cluster for the umami taste according to the first connector with the Tas1r1 and/or Tas1r3 genes. Our findings identify several taste related regulatory genes and extend previous genetic background of porcine umami taste.