Cardiotoxic effects of mycotoxin citrinin on mammalian cells revealed by transcriptome profiling

Mycotoxin citrinin (CTN) is widely found in multiple types of grains in foods and feeds globally. CTN also contaminates Monascus-derived health supplements such as red yeast rice and red yeast extracts during the fermentation process, which are originally used for preventing cardiovascular diseases. A previous study has reported that CTN is cardiotoxic to zebrafish embryos during their development by interfering some cardiogenic genes and pathways, showing a potential risk of consuming CTN-contaminated foods and products. However, the cardiotoxic effects and the underlying mechanisms of CTN on mammalian cardiomyocytes remain unclear and need to be ellucidated. In this study, we performed RNA-seq experiments in order to investigate the transcriptomic alterations induced by CTN-exposed rat H9c2 cardiomyocytes. The transcriptome profiling we obtained may reveal some evidence regarding the toxic effects of CTN on cardiac phenotypes, chromosome segregation, tubulin arrangement, mitochondrial functioning, and stress responses, etc. RNA-seq analysis was performed for CTN-exposed cardiac cells. Rat cardiomyoblast H9c2 cells were treated with vehicle (CTN_0) and 50 μM of CTN (CTN_50) for 48 h. Four biological replicates were pooled for one batch; two independent batches of samples were sent for RNA-seq.