Unraveling proteome changes and potential regulatory proteins of bovine follicular Granulosa cells by mass spectrometry and multi-omics analysis

BACKGROUND: In previous study, we performed next-gene sequencing to investigate the differentially expressed transcripts of bovine follicular granulosa cells (GCs) at dominant follicle (DF) and subordinate follicle (SF) stages during first follicular wave. Present study is designed to further identify the key regulatory proteins and signaling pathways associated with follicular development using label-free liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) and multi-omics data analysis approach. METHODS: DF and SF from three cattle were collected by daily ultrasonography. The GCs were isolated from each follicle, total proteins were digested by trypsin, and then proteomic analyzed via LC-MS/MS, respectively. Proteins identified were retrieved from Uniprot-COW fasta database, and differentially expressed proteins were used to functional enrichment and KEGG pathway analysis. Proteome data and transcriptome data obtained from previous studies were integrated. RESULTS: Total 3409 proteins were identified from 30,321 peptides (FDR ≤0.01) obtained from LC-MS/MS analysis and 259 of them were found to be differentially expressed at different stage of follicular development (fold Change > 2, P < 0.05). KEGG pathway analysis of proteome data revealed important signaling pathways associated with follicular development, multi-omics data analysis results showed 13 proteins were identified as being differentially expressed in DF versus SF. CONCLUSIONS: This study represents the first investigation of transcriptome and proteome of bovine follicles and offers essential information for future investigation of DF and SF in cattle. It also will enrich the theory of animal follicular development. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12953-019-0152-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.