Pregestational Diabetes Alters Cardiac changes

Objective: To evaluate the altered expression of genes due to hyperglycaemia during foetal development in heart. Methods: To understand the molecular defects in the two-days old neonatal rats, diabetic female rats were bred with healthy male rats and collected two days old hearts from neonates. Heart mRNA profiles of two-day-old neonatal rats were generated by RNA sequencing, in quadruplicate, using Illumina HiSeq. Results: Using an optimized data analysis workflow, we mapped about 27 million sequence reads per sample to the rat genome (build Rnor_6.0) and identified 25456 transcripts in the heart of the neonatal rats. Approximately 4% of the transcripts showed differential expression between the Control and PGDM (pregestational diabetes mellitus) heart, with a fold change =2 and p value <0.05. Conclusions: Transcriptomic profiling of the RNA-seq data revealed that several of the altered genes were associated with cardiac pathogenesis in neonatal heart during PGDM. Overall design: Neonatal heart mRNA profiles of two-day old rats