Alternative Transcript Splicing in Response to Marek Disease Virus Infection in Chicken

There is growing awareness that regulation of gene expression is an important contributor to complex traits such as genetic resistance to disease. Therefore, we conducted a comprehensive screen to detect and validate alternative transcript splicing in response to Marek’s disease virus (MDV) infection in two experimental chicken lines that differed greatly in genetic resistance to Marek’s disease. Based on a computational and RNA seq data, we identified 1574 candidate genes that potentially had differentially spliced isoforms between uninfected and MDV-infected birds at 4 days post-infection (dpi). Further verification confirmed that at least 8 genes had different isomers between uninfected and infected individuals at 4 dpi. Three genes had an extra exon unique to the resistant line while two other genes showed unique exons for the susceptible line. The other two genes exhibited splice variants with polymorphisms in the exon size. Our data demonstrates that MDV induces splice variants in chicken genes, which may contribute to genetic resistance.