SpinalCordInjury_PBM-main

Spinal cord injury (SCI) affects more than a million people every year and causes lifelong disability and at present there is nothing available to treat the underlying condition. Hence, there are no reparative therapies currently available. We have recently shown that photobiomodulation (PBM) using low level red or near-infrared light therapy is neuroprotective and axon regenerative and thus improves sensory and locomotor function in preclincal models of SCI. In this project, we used our well-established dorsal column lesion model of SCI and treated the lesion site with PBM subcutaneously for 3 days. We then harvested the lesion site, extracted the RNA and subjected the total RNA to who genome transcriptome sequencing and subsequent pathway analysis.
We trimmed the raw read counts using iDEP96, pre-processed to limit genes to 0.5 counts per million and compared PMB treated (T) versus control (C). Counts were transformed for clustering and PCA analysis and identified differentially expressed genes using DESeq2. Volcano plots, k-means and heatmaps were all performed. Pathway analysis was performed using GAGE and the top 20 pathways for gene ontology and KEGG terms were identified. For exploratory networks, GO terms and KEGG pathways were retireved from STRING database.