Project description:Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) presented in venous plasma have recently been demonstrated as powerful biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognostic prediction of complex diseases like cancer. Nevertheless, those presented in arterial plasma have been ignored based on the assumption that the miRNA profiles in arterial and venous plasma would be identical. Here, we disputed this intuitive assumption by comparing arterial and venous plasma miRNA expression profiles from male rats using microarray technique. Though the microRNA profiles were largely similar, a considerable number of miRNAs showed significant differential expression, including 10 arterial highly expressed miRNAs and 14 venous highly expressed miRNAs. The differentially expressed miRNAs were validated by qRT-PCR. We performed computational analysis of the function enrichment and disease association of these miRNAs and their targets. Our analysis also suggested significant correlations between plasma miRNA expression and tissue miRNA expression. Four arterial highly expressed miRNAs showed enriched expression in specific tissues and thus could serve as novel biomarker candidates.
Project description:Background: miRNAs derived from peripheral venous blood gained extensive attention as clinical biomarkers, while arterial miRNAs exhibited slightly different expression profiles. We compared the expression profiles of venous- and arterial-derived plasma miRNA between young and aged male SD rats by next-generation sequencing, in order to explore whether peripheral venous miRNAs can represent entire circulating vessels in abnormal conditions like aging. Results: MSigDB Hallmark Gene Set reference and TAM 2.0 server were used to investigate the enriched functions and associated diseases. The aging-related de-regulated miRNAs in artery and vein shown similar enriched functional terms. Of note, refer to the arterial-versus-venous differential-expressed miRNA profiles, only a few miRNAs shared between young and aged rats. Among them, miR-450a/b and miR-223 shown the similar tendency between young and aged rat, while miR-136 and miR-503 etc displayed the opposite direction under the same scenario. Since miRNAs are under the control of their specific transcriptional factors, we further analyzed upstream regulators which influence miRNAs level for vascular vessel location. TransmiR v2.0 tool was used and found enriched upstream transcription factors like NFκB and SIRT1. These transcriptional factors could be organ-specific expression and/or regulated in physiological and aging states as parts of plausible causal factors. Conclusion: This study screened and analyzed the differential differential-expressed miRNA profiles in arterial and venous plasma under aging conditions, suggesting the importance of origin of candidate circulating miRNA biomarkers upon the certain scenario and its potential regulatory rule.
Project description:Molecular pathways regulating the development of arterial and venous endothelial cells (ECs) are now well-established, but control of parallel arterial-venous (A-V) alignment is unclear. We report that arterial-venous alignment in the skin is determined by apelin receptor (APJ) expression in venous ECs.