Depletion of miR-144/451 alleviates anemia in β-thalassemic mice

Tto investigate whether ablation of miR-144/451 is deleterious for th3+/- mice, we crossed miR-144/451 knockout (mKO) mice (with mild anemia at baseline)13 with th3+/- mice (with severe anemia). We found that mKO/th3+/- double-mutant mice exhibited dramatic improvement in anemia. To explore the mechanism of anemia improvement in mKO/th3+/- mice, we fractionated erythroblasts from bone marrow of four genotypes mice, including WT,mKO, th3+/-,mKO/th3+/- mice,for microarray analysis. We used microarrays to detail the comparative gene expression profiling analysis for erythroblastsand of th3+/- and mKO/th3+/- mice.