Whole blood derived cadmium responsive miRNome

Purpose: Cadmium is a nonessential heavy metal and a well known toxic agent. Cadmium is known to alter the gene expression and signaling but the role of miRNAs during Cadmium exposure is not understood. Methods: Mice were treated with 100 mg/ ml cadmium chloride for 120 days and accumulation of cadmium in blood and organs are confirmed by GFAAS. Subsequently, the total RNA was isolated from the whole blood and small RNA sequencing was executed in Illumina HiSeq 1000. Results: The reads were annotated to the mice genome and miRNAs in miRbase using miRDeep* and novel miRNAs were also predicted. The differential expression was studied by DeSeq Conclusions: This is the first report to reveal the cadmium responsive miRNome. These candidate miRNAs can serve as biomarkers for cadmium Overall design: Whole blood small RNA profiles of control and cadmium exposed mice generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq 1000