Project description:Transcriptome of primary hepatocytes from female and male C57BL/6N wild type mice after 0 to 96 hours of culture. This study aimed to deliver fundamental information on sex differences in primary mouse hepatocytes in vitro.
Project description:The liver is one of the most sexually dimorphic organs. The hepatic metabolic pathways that are subject to sexual dimorphism include xenobiotic, amino acid and lipid metabolism. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma are among diseases with sex-dependent prevalence, progression and outcome. Although male and female livers differ in their abilities to metabolize foreign compounds, including drugs, sex-dependent treatment and pharmacological dynamics are rarely applied in all relevant cases. Therefore, it is important to consider hepatic sexual dimorphism when developing new treatment strategies and to understand the underlying mechanisms in model systems. We isolated primary hepatocytes from male and female C57BL6/N mice and examined the sex-dependent transcriptome, proteome and extracellular metabolome parameters in the course of culturing them for 96 h. The sex-specific gene expression of the general xenobiotic pathway altered and the female-specific expression of Cyp2b13 and Cyp2b9 was significantly reduced during culture. Sex-dependent differences of several signaling pathways increased, including genes related to serotonin and melatonin degradation. Furthermore, the ratios of male and female gene expression were inversed for other pathways, such as amino acid degradation, beta-oxidation, androgen signaling and hepatic steatosis. Because the primary hepatocytes were cultivated without the influence of known regulators of sexual dimorphism, these results suggest currently unknown modulatory mechanisms of sexual dimorphism in vitro. The large sex-dependent differences in the regulation and dynamics of drug metabolism observed during cultivation can have an immense influence on the evaluation of pharmacodynamic processes when conducting initial preclinical trials to investigate potential new drugs.
Project description:MicroRNAs is a rapidly expanding area expected to change the way in which diseases will be diagnosed, treated and monitored in the future. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) shows a rising incidence with high mortality but lack of effective targeted therapies. We identified the aberrantly expressed miRNAs involved in HCC through the comparison of miRNA expression profiling in cancerous hepatocytes with that in normal primary human hepatocytes and found 37 dysregulated miRNAs in HCC. These aberrantly expressed miRNAs may provide insights into pathogenesis of HCC and thus may be used for diagnosis and therapy. Over the past few years, though several studies have uncovered aberrant miRNA expression profiles in HCC compared with matched nonmalignant tissues, the overlap of deregulated miRNAs from different platforms is limited. To solve this problem, we recommend a method that using primary cancer cells or cancer cell lines and nonmalignant primary cells to identify the specific aberrantly miRNA expression profiles in HCC and even in other types of cancer. Here, we identified the aberrantly expressed miRNAs involved in hepatoma through the comparison of miRNA expression profiling in cancerous hepatocytes with that in normal primary human hepatocytes and 37 dysregulated miRNAs were screened out by 2-fold change with a significant difference (P<0.05). Clustering analysis based on 13 miRNAs whose fold changes were over 15-fold change exhibited significantly differential expression pattern between the cancerous and normal hepatocytes.