Abstract:
The research on circRNA has been keeping exploring since it was discovered. As an endogenous competitive ncRNA, it generally exists in mammals with covalently closed loop, and has the characteristics of high expression, conservation, tissue specificity and developmental stage specificity. circRNA comes from multiple sources, which includes 5’-exons encoding protein, intron circularization, intergenic region sequences, UTRs, non-coding loci or antisense chains of known transcripts. The occurrence of circRNA is affected by a variety of regulatory mechanisms, and the occurrence of different subtypes of circRNA is regulated by different regulatory mechanisms.In addition, circRNA is also versatile. As a "sponge" of miRNAs, it competitively binds miRNAs, to remove the inhibition of miRNAs on target genes, regulates gene expression, binds with proteins to form circRNA-protein complex, participates in diseases as biomarkers diagnosis and encoding proteins. From the current research, it was found that circRNA is specifically expressed in intermuscular fat(IMF) tissues of livestock and poultry, which may participate in the regulatory network of IMF to play a regulatory role. This study expounds the discovery, origin,occurrence, regul-ation mechanism, biological function and research progress of circRNA in meat flavour of livestock and poultry, which is helpful to further study the regulation mechanism of circRNA in meat flavour and provides a certain theoretical basis for genetic improvement of meat quality of livestock and poultry.