Table10_Investigation of the transability of dietary small non-coding RNAs to animals.XLSX

Our daily diet not only provides essential nutrients needed for survival and growth but also supplies bioactive ingredients to promote health and prevent disease. Recent studies have shown that exogenous microRNAs (miRNAs), xenomiRs, may enter the consumer’s body through dietary intake and regulate gene expression. This fascinating phenomenon suggests that xenomiRs can act as a new class of bioactive substances associated with mammalian systems. In contrast, several studies have failed to detect xenomiRs in consumers and reported that the observed diet-derived miRNAs in the previous studies can be related to the false positive effects of experiments. This discrepancy can be attributed to the potential artifacts related to the process of experiments, small sample size, and inefficient bioinformatics pipeline. Since this hypothesis is not generally accepted yet, more studies are required. Here, a stringent and reliable bioinformatics pipeline was used to analyze 133 miRNA sequencing data from seven different studies to investigate this phenomenon. Generally, our results do not support the transfer of diet-derived miRNAs into the animal/human tissues in every situation. Briefly, xenomiRs were absent from most samples, and also, their expressions were very low in the samples where they were present, which is unlikely to be sufficient to regulate cell transcripts. Furthermore, this study showed that the possibility of miRNAs being absorbed through animals’ diets and thus influencing gene expression during specific periods of biological development is not inconceivable. In this context, our results were in agreement with the theory of the transfer of small RNAs under certain conditions and periods as xenomiRs were found in colostrum which may modulate infants’ immune systems via post-transcriptional regulation. These findings provide evidence for the selective absorption of diet-derived small RNAs, which need to be investigated in future studies to shed light on the mechanisms underlying the transference of diet-derived miRNAs.

我们的日常饮食不仅为生存与成长提供了必需的营养素，还提供了促进健康和预防疾病的生物活性成分。近期研究表明，外源性微小RNA（miRNA）、异源miRs，可能通过饮食摄入进入消费者的体内，并调节基因表达。这一引人入胜的现象表明，异源miRs可作为一类与哺乳动物系统相关的新的生物活性物质。然而，一些研究未能检测到消费者体内的异源miRs，并报告称，先前研究中观察到的饮食来源的miRNA可能与实验的假阳性效应有关。这种差异可以归因于实验过程中的潜在误差、样本量小以及生物信息学流程的低效。鉴于这一假设尚未得到普遍认可，还需要进行更多研究。在此，我们采用了严格可靠的生物信息学流程，分析了来自七个不同研究的133个miRNA测序数据，以研究这一现象。总体而言，我们的研究结果不支持饮食来源的miRNA在所有情况下都能转移到动物/人体组织中。简而言之，异源miRs在大多数样本中均未发现，即使在存在异源miRs的样本中，其表达也非常低，这不足以调节细胞转录。此外，本研究还表明，miRNAs通过动物饮食被吸收并在特定生物发育阶段影响基因表达的可能是存在的。在此背景下，我们的研究结果与某些条件下和特定时期小RNA转移的理论相符，因为异源miRs在初乳中被发现，可能通过转录后调控调节婴儿的免疫系统。这些发现为饮食来源的小RNA的选择性吸收提供了证据，这些内容需要在未来的研究中进一步探讨，以阐明饮食来源的miRNA转移的潜在机制。