The miRNA expression profiles of serum microvesicles in acute ischemic stroke patients and healthy controls using high-throughput sequencing

Purpose: Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized systems-based analysis of cellular pathways. The goals of this study are to compare NGS-derived retinal transcriptome profiling (RNA-seq) to microarray and quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT–PCR) methods and to evaluate protocols for optimal high-throughput data analysis Methods: The serum microvesicles of five acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and healthy controls was purified using Ribo™ Exosome Isolation Reagent (C10110-2, RIBOBIO, Guangzhou, China) and analyzed by flow cytometry and nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA).The miRNA expression profiles of serum microvesicles of five acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and healthy controls were detected by RNA-seq using llumina HiSeqTM 2500. Results: Using an optimized data analysis workflow, 732 miRNA species were detected in total. The levels of 51 individual miRNA species were significantly different between AIS patients and healthy controls. Conclusions: Our study represents the first detailed analysis of miRNA expression profiles of serum microvesicles in AIS and healthy controls, generated by RNA-seq technology. The optimized data analysis workflows reported here should provide a framework for comparative investigations of expression profiles. Our results show that NGS offers a comprehensive and more accurate quantitative and qualitative evaluation of miRNA content in serum microvesicles. We conclude that RNA-seq based non-coding RNA characterization would expedite genetic network analyses and permit the dissection of complex biologic functions. The miRNA expression profiles of serum microvesicles in acute ischemic stroke patients and healthy controls