Abstract
Despite their important functions and nearly ubiquitous presence in cells, an understanding of the biology of intracellular lipid droplets (LDs) in goose follicle development remains limited. An integrated study of lipidomic and transcriptomic analyses was performed in a cellular model of stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) function, to determine the effects of intracellular LDs on follicle development in geese. Numerous internalized LDs, which were generally spherical in shape, were dispersed throughout the cytoplasm of granulosa cells (GCs) by confocal microscopy analysis, with altered SCD expression affecting LD content. GCs lipidomics profiling showed that the majority of the differentially abundant lipids classes were glycerophospholipids, including PA, PC, PE, PG, PI and PS, and glycerolipids, including DG and TG, which enriched the glycerophospholipid metabolism, sphingolipid metabolism and glycerolipid metabolism. As compared with lipidomics, transcriptomics provided differentially expressed genes (DEGs), part of which were assigned to lipid-related Gene Ontology slim terms. More DEGs were assigned in the SCD-knockdown group than in the SCD-overexpressed group. Integration of the differentially significant genes and lipids into pathway enrichment analysis identified potentially targetable pathways in glycerolipid/glycerophospholipid metabolism. These results demonstrated the importance of lipids in providing novel insights to understand follicle development, thus providing a potential lead to new avenues for deciphering the underlying mechanisms of lipid-mediated follicle development.