miRNAs regulate a variety of biological processes through pairing-based regulation of gene expression at the 3' end of the noncoding region of the target miRNA. miRNAs were found to be abnormally expressed in ischemia/reperfusion injury models. High-throughput sequencing is a recently developed method for sequencing miRNAs and has been widely used in the analysis of miRNAs. In this study, ischemia/reperfusion injury models were intracerebroventricularly injected with 50 μg/kg apelin-13. High-throughput sequencing showed that 357 known miRNAs were differentially expressed among rat models, among which 78 changed to > 2-fold or < 0.5-fold. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction was selected to confirm the expression levels of four miRNAs that were differentially expressed, the results of which were consistent with the results of high-throughput sequencing. Gene Ontology analysis revealed that the predicted targets of the different miRNAs are particularly associated with cellular process, metabolic process, single-organism process, cell, and binding. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Gene and Genome analysis showed that the target genes are involved in metabolic pathways, mitogen-activated protein kinase signaling pathway, calcium signaling pathway, and nuclear factor-κB signaling pathway. Our findings suggest that differentially expressed miRNAs and their target genes play an important role in ischemia/reperfusion injury and neuroprotection by apelin-13.
Keywords: RNA sequencing; apelin; high-throughput sequencing; ischemia/reperfusion injury; microRNA; nerve regeneration; neural regeneration; neuropeptide; neuroprotection.