microRNAs profiling of CD4+ T and CD8+ T lymphacytes from liver and mesentetic lymph nodes in NAFLD and normal mice. Mus musculus

Emerging evidence suggests that microRNAs (miRNAs) are crucially involved in pathogenesis of NAFLD. The integrated analysis of expression profiles of miRNAs and mRNAs can be used to identify functional miRNA-target relationships with high precision. The purpose of this study was to provide insights into the immunopathogenesis of NAFLD using this integrated analysis method.Differentially expressed miRNAs and mRNAs of CD4+ T lymphocytes from liver and mesenteric lymph nodes(MLN) of NAFLD and normal mice were analyzed by microarrays and RNA sequencing respectively. Subsequently, the target genes of the differentially expressed miRNAs were predicted and overlapped with the differentially expressed mRNAs. Then, GO and pathway analyses were performed for the intersecting key genes. The microarray analysis indicated that 170 miRNAs and 2,791 mRNAs were significantly dysregulated in CD4+ T lymphocytes from liver between the two groups. Among the 2,791 mRNAs, 911 overlapped with putative miRNA target genes. A pathway analysis showed that the MAPK pathway was consistently enriched in the liver of NAFLD mice. miR-149-3p, miR-663a, miR-1908, miR-2861 and miR-3185 likely play important roles in the regulation of MAPK pathways. Furthermore, the Notch signaling pathway This study provides an integrated dataset of the miRNA and mRNA profiles in NAFLD, and the results demonstrate that not only the MAPK pathway and its related miRNAs but also the Notch pathway may be involved in NAFLD immunological development. Overall design: we pooled RNA of CD4+T cells and CD8+T cells form six individual mice equally into one pool, since the number of cells from one mouse is limited