The expression profile of long non-coding RNAs in the lung tissue of mice with cecal ligation and puncture-induced sepsis.

Abstract

When sepsis occurs, the lungs are the first organs that are affected. Injury to the lungs involves damage to and the subsequent repair of cells and tissue. However, the mechanism of both at a molecular level remains unclear. As mice have similar physiological and pathological processes to humans, the current research adopted mice models to explore the long non-coding ribonucleic acid (lncRNA) in the lung tissue of mice with cecal ligation and puncture (CLP)-induced sepsis using gene sequencing analysis. A total of 30 mice were randomly divided into two groups, i.e., the sham group and the CLP group, respectively. Three mice were randomly selected from each group, and their lung tissue was used for gene sequencing analysis. Overall, a total of 1,110 lncRNAs were found to be significantly differentially expressed between the two groups. Among these, 658 were over-expressed, and 452 were under-expressed (fold change ≥ 2.0, P < 0.05). Gene ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses were performed to predict the potential biological functions of these differentially expressed lncRNAs, and the top 10 over- and under-expressed lncRNAs were selected as candidates for further validation. Finally, three over-expressed lncRNAs (XLOC_025752, XLOC_086176, and XLOC_148721) and four under-expressed lncRNAs (XLOC_120813, XLOC_029657, XLOC_031620, and XLOC_096198) were validated and found to be the same as those identified by sequencing analysis. To the best of the authors's knowledge, this research is the first to explore the expression profile of lncRNAs in the lung tissue of mice with CLP-induced sepsis. The results showed different lncRNA expression profiles between the two groups, indicating that lncRNAs may contribute to the occurrence of and recovery from sepsis-induced acute lung injury through interacting with target genes.