Highly polymorphic bovine leptin gene

The leptin, an anti-obesity protein, is a hormone protein expressed and secreted mainly from adipocyte tissue, and involved in regulation of body weight, food intake and energy metabolism. In an effort to discover polymorphism(s) in genes whose variant(s) might be implicated in phenotypic traits of growth, we have sequenced exons and their boundaries of leptin gene including 1,000 bp upstream of promoter region with twenty-four unrelated Korean cattle. Fifty-seven sequence variants were identified: fourteen in 5′ flanking region, twenty-seven in introns, eight in exons, and eight in 3′ flanking region. By pair-wise linkage analysis among polymorphisms, ten sets of SNPs were in absolute linkage disequilibrium (LD) (|D′| = 1 and r ² = 1). Among variants identified, thirty-six SNPs were newly identified, and twenty-one SNPs, which were reported in other breeds, were also confirmed in Korean cattle. The allele frequencies of variants were quite different among breeds. The information from SNPs of bovine leptin gene could be useful for further genetic studies of this gene.