Tubulin mRNA stability is sensitive to change in microtubule dynamics caused by multiple physiological and toxic cues

The goal of this study is to compare gene expression profiles in quiescent RPE1 hTert cells treated with microtubule-stabilizing (paclitaxel) and microtubule-destabilizing poisons (combretastatin A4) RPE 1 hTert cells were grown to full confluency, and maintained as such for 5 days to induce quiescence. Quiescent cells were treated with microtubule poisons combretastatin A4 and paclitaxel for 6 or 24 hours. Total RNA was collected and purified using the PureLink RNA Mini Kit (Invitrogen, Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA). RNA concentration and quality were determined using NanoDrop and Bioanalyzer respectively, and 500 ng of purified RNA was used as input for the Illumina TruSeq Stranded mRNA Library Prep Kit (Illumina, USA). Barcoded libraries were pooled and quantitated using KAPA, and single-end sequenced on an Illumina NextSeq (Illumina, USA). RNA-seq reads were mapped using STAR (version 2.1.0j) and processed using HTSeq-count (version 0.6.1). GRCh38 reference genome and transcript annotations were used for gene mapping; Entrez Gene identifiers and org.Hs.eg.db database were used for genome wide annotation. Differential gene expression and statistical analysis were performed using edgeR package. Genes with >50 reads per million and a fold change significantly different from zero in Wilcoxon signed-rank test (p< 0.05), were marked as differentially expressed genes, based on three biological replicates.