Porcine Mediobasal Hypothalamus RNA-Sequencing

Delayed attainment of puberty is a major reason for removal of replacement gilts from the herd. To investigate the physiological factors underlying delayed puberty in gilts, transcriptomic data from mediobasal hypothalamus were obtained from age-matched delayed puberty gilts and normal cyclic control gilts at follicular phase and luteal phase of the estrous cycle. A three-way gene x individual x tissue clustering analysis was performed using tensor decomposition to obtain gene expression modules. Additionally, differences in gene expression in the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovary axis was analyzed between delayed puberty and cyclic gilts to gain understanding of how the tissues may differ between gilts that are of similar ages but at different levels of sexual development.