Abstract
BackgroundMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs playing an important role in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. We have previously shown that hepatic transcript profiles are different between males and females; that some of these differences are under the regulation of growth hormone (GH); and that mild starvation diminishes some of the differences. In this study, we tested if hepatic miRNAs are regulated in a similar manner.ResultsUsing microarrays, miRNA screening was performed to identify sex-dependent miRNAs in rat liver. Out of 324 unique probes on the array, 254 were expressed in the liver and eight (3% of 254) of those were found to be different between the sexes. Among the eight putative sex-different miRNAs, only one female-predominant miRNA (miR-29b) was confirmed using quantitative real-time PCR. Furthermore, 1 week of continuous GH-treatment in male rats reduced the levels of miR-451 and miR-29b, whereas mild starvation (12 hours) raised the levels of miR-451, miR-122a and miR-29b in both sexes. The biggest effects were obtained on miR-29b with GH-treatment.ConclusionWe conclude that hepatic miRNA levels depend on the hormonal and nutritional status of the animal and show that miR-29b is a female-predominant and GH-regulated miRNA in rat liver.
Highlights
MicroRNAs are short non-coding RNAs playing an important role in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression
Among the sex-different miRNAs listed in the table, only miR-21, miR-29b and miR-122a have been shown to be expressed in liver before [4,6,17,18,19,20,21,22], implying that the other five might be "new" hepatic miRNAs
Using assays designed for human U6B quantification, we failed to detect it in our rat samples. 5S rRNA was instead used as reference RNA, since it is of similar size as miRNAs
Summary
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs playing an important role in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. We have previously shown that hepatic transcript profiles are different between males and females; that some of these differences are under the regulation of growth hormone (GH); and that mild starvation diminishes some of the differences. We tested if hepatic miRNAs are regulated in a similar manner. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNAs of 19–25 base pairs in length. Most of the well-defined miRNAs are highly conserved across species, suggesting their importance in cellular regulation. These small RNAs are processed from precursor molecules that are either transcribed as ordinary genes (pri-miRNA) or generated as byproducts from splicing. At least five possible mechanisms for this miRNA-dependent (page number not for citation purposes)
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