Effective control of neuropathic pain by interrupting C/EBPβ-CLEC7A cross-talk-mediated NLRP3 inflammasome-dependent pyroptosis

Neuropathic pain (NP) is a complex chronic pain due to the nervous system damage or diseases.During NP development and progression, the neuroinflammation has been observed along the pain pathways from the spinal cord to the thalamus and the parietal cortex. It may be caused by the activation of glial cells, especially microglia, with production of cytokines and other inflammatory mediators within the central nervous system (CNS), especially in spinal cord. In this study, we used microarrays to detect the global gene expression in spinal cord of rats in sham group and CCI model group(an animal model of neuropathic pain), and the differentially expressed genes between diseases and control group were obtained. SC tissues (L4-L6) collected from the rats in the Sham and CCI groups (n= 3 per group) on postoperative day 10 were immersed in TRIzol (Invitrogen, CA, USA) and immediately frozen in liquid nitrogen for the whole-genome microarray detection. Microarray experiments were performed using the Affymetrix GeneChip® Rat Gene 2.0 ST Arrays (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA) by Shanghai GMINIX Biotechnology Corporation (Shanghai, China).