Animal Molecular Breeding, 2025, Vol.15, No.2, 60-71 http://animalscipublisher.com/index.php/amb 60 Review Article Open Access Epigenetic Regulation of Growth and Feather Development in Ducks Jingya Li, Mengyue Chen Animal Science Research Center, Cuixi Academy of Biotechnology, Zhuji, 311800, Zhejiang, China Corresponding author: mengyue.chen@cuixi.org Animal Molecular Breeding, 2025, Vol.15, No.2 doi: 10.5376/amb.2025.15.0007 Received: 01 Feb., 2025 Accepted: 05 Mar., 2025 Published: 20 Mar., 2025 Copyright © 2025 Li and Chen, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Li J.Y., and Chen M.Y., 2025, Epigenetic regulation of growth and feather development in ducks, Animal Molecular Breeding, 15(2): 60-71 (doi: 10.5376/amb.2025.15.0007) Abstract Duck is an important economic poultry, and its growth rate and feather development are directly related to meat and poultry yield and feather quality. This study reviews the latest progress in recent years on epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation, histone modification and non-coding RNA during duck growth and feather development. Literature shows that DNA methylation plays an important regulatory role in the muscle growth and metabolism of duck embryos, and environmental factors such as temperature and nutrition can affect the growth performance of ducks by changing the methylation state. In terms of feather development, epigenetic mechanisms mediate gene expression reprogramming during the transition from primary down feather to mature feathers, and miRNA and lncRNA are involved in complex regulatory networks of feather follicle formation and feather growth cycle. In summary, duck growth and feather development are regulated by multi-level epigenetic regulation, including DNA methylation remodeling development-related gene expression, histone modifications to alter chromatin status, and non-coding RNA-mediated post-transcriptional regulation. A deep understanding of these mechanisms helps to reveal the molecular basis of differences in duck growth and feather morphology, and provides new ideas for improving poultry breeding and production performance. Keywords Duck feather development; DNA methylation; Histone modification; Non-coding RNA; Epigenetic regulation 1 Introduction Duck occupies an important position in the global livestock and poultry industry and is one of the main sources of meat and down products. With the development of modern breeding, breeding work has significantly improved the growth rate and meat production performance of ducks, but it also brought about certain physiological development problems, such as shortening of the growth period accompanied by incomplete muscle development and incomplete feathers during slaughter (Chen et al., 2017). Therefore, on the basis of ensuring the results of genetic selection and breeding, it is of great significance to conduct in-depth research on the molecular mechanisms that affect duck growth and feather development. Recent studies have found that epigenetics provides a new perspective for understanding how genes and the environment work together on traits. Epigenetic mechanisms can regulate gene expression without changing DNA base sequences, resulting in phenotypic differences under conditions of constant genotype (Sepers et al., 2019). Epigenetics mainly includes DNA methylation, histone covalent modification (such as acetylation, methylation, etc.), and non-coding RNA-mediated regulation of gene expression (Huang et al., 2025). DNA methylation usually occurs on the CpG dinucleotides in the promoter region of the gene, and the increased methylation level is often associated with gene silencing; post-translational modification of histones changes the degree of chromatin tightness, thereby affecting the accessibility of transcription factors to genes. In addition, non-coding RNAs such as microRNAs (miRNAs), long-chain non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and circular RNAs (circRNAs) can finely regulate gene function at the post-transcriptional or translational level by interacting with target mRNAs or proteins (Chen et al., 2017). Together, these epigenetic mechanisms form a complex regulatory network, which plays an important role in the processes of duck muscle growth, fat deposition, gonad development, and feather morphology construction.
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