Alteration of m6A epitranscriptomic tagging of ribonucleic acids after spinal cord injury in mice

Shuangfei Ni; Zixiang Luo; Yonggang Fan; Weixin Zhang; Wei Peng; Huafeng Zhang

doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.904573

Alteration of m⁶A epitranscriptomic tagging of ribonucleic acids after spinal cord injury in mice

Front Neurosci. 2022 Aug 25:16:904573. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.904573. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Shuangfei Ni¹, Zixiang Luo², Yonggang Fan¹, Weixin Zhang³, Wei Peng², Huafeng Zhang¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Orthopaedics, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China.
² Department of Spine Surgery and Orthopaedics, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China.
³ Department of Orthopaedics, Zhejiang Chinese Medicine University, Hangzhou, China.

Abstract

The m⁶A methylation is reported to function in multiple physiological and pathological processes. However, the functional relevance of m⁶A modification to post-spinal cord injured (SCI) damage is not yet clear. In the present study, methylated RNA immunoprecipitation combined with microarray analysis showed that the global RNA m⁶A levels were decreased following SCI. Then, gene ontology (GO) and kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) analyses were conducted to demonstrate the potential function of differential m⁶A-tagged transcripts and the altered transcripts with differential m⁶A levels. In addition, we found that the m⁶A "writer," METTL3, significantly decreased after SCI in mice. The immunostaining validated that the expression of METTL3 mainly changed in GFAP or Iba-1⁺ cells. Together, this study shows the alteration of m⁶A modification following SCI in mice, which might contribute to the pathophysiology of the spinal cord after trauma.

Keywords: METTL3 (methyltransferase like 3); RNA; m6A (N6-methyladenosine); microarray; spinal cord injured (SCI).