Discovery and characterization of miRNAs in mouse thymus responses to ionizing radiation by deep sequencing

Abstract

To investigate the potential regulatory roles of microRNA (miRNA) in mouse response to ionizing radiation (IR)-induced thymus injury, miRNA expression profiles of mouse thymus with or without IR were analyzed using deep sequencing technology. Potential target candidates of the identified miRNA were predicted using RNAhybrid and miRanda. Differently expressed miRNA targets functional annotation and pathways were noted using Swiss-Prot, Gene Ontology (GO), Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COG), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and non-redundant (NR) databases. In this study, there were 112 differently expressed miRNAs identified, including 45 known mature and 67 novel miRNAs, which meanwhile contained 77 up-regulated and 35 down-regulated miRNAs. The results of quantitative RT-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) verification were in agreement with the sequencing analysis. And the target genes of miRNA were annotated. These results revealed the differences of miRNA expression, further extended the biological knowledge and greatly facilitated future studies on the function of miRNA in IR-induced thymus injury.

Keywords:

• Deep sequencing
• irradiation
• miRNA
• mouse
• thymus

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr Yanan Guo for helpful discussions.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are response for the content and writing of the paper.

Funding

This research was financially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 31201342), the Outstanding Young Talent Research Fund of Zhengzhou University (No. 1421311080), and the Research Project of People’s Liberation Army (No. AX110C002).