Abstract—Amelogenin (AMEL) is a conserved gene located on the sex chromosomes of mammals. It is involved in the formation of enamel, which is the hard, white material that forms the protective outer layer of each tooth. In this study, we first cloned the coding sequences of the goat     AMELX     and    AMELY    transcripts from female and male lamb enamel tissues during tooth development. All 207 amino acids of the  putative   AMEL   proteins  from the cDNA coding regions of both sex chromosomes were the same, but the   AMEL   sequences of the 3’-untranslated regions (UTR) were different. The res  ults showed that the nucleotide sequences of intron 5 of the goat   AMELX   and  AME LY genes  contained multiple deletions/insertions and had only 48.5% iden tity. Based on the dimorphic AMEL intron sequences, a set of sex-specific primers was successfully applied to goat gender determination. A high sensitivity for sex determination was reached with a minimal amount of template, such as a trace amount of genomic DNA from a single blastomere isolated from embryos at the blastula stage among different strains of goats.

Index Terms—Goat amelogenin gene, polymorphic DNA, embryo sexing, single blastomeres, preimplantation.

Chuan-Mu Chen and T. C. Tsai are the Department of Life Sciences, National Chung Hsing University, 250, Kuo-Kuang Road, Taichung 402, Taiwan (e-mail: chchen1@dragon.nchu.edu.tw, proteinase86@ yahoo.com.tw).
H. L. Chen is with the Department of Bioresources, Da-Yeh University, Changhwa 515, Taiwan (e-mail: bellchen@mail.dyu.edu.tw).
J. C. Huang, D. C. Wang, and Hengchun Branch are the Livestock Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Taiwan (e-mail: jchuang@mail.tlri.gov.tw; dcwang@mail.tlri.gov.tw).

 

Cite:Hsiao-Ling Chen, Tung-Chou Tsai, Jan-Chi Huang, De-Chi Wang, and Chuan-Mu Chen, "Dimorphic Goat Amelogenin Alleles on Sex Chromosomes for Gender Determination of Preimplantation Embryos," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 3, no. 6, pp. 619-623, 2013.