Transcriptome profiling of the livers from Mettl3 flox/flox and hepatocyte-specific Mettl3 knockout (HKO) mice

The goal of this study is to compare transcriptome profilings of liver from Mettl3 flox/flox and hepatocyte-specific Mettl3 knockout (HKO) mice. Gene ontology analysis showed that the dowregulated genes were associated with monocarboxylic acid metabolic process, small molecule catabolic process, fatty acid metabolic process, cofactor metabolic process, organic acid catabolic process, and lipid biosynthetic process, whereas the upregulated genes were associated with leukocyte migration, cell chemotaxis, leukocyte cell-cell adhesion, positive regulation of cytokine production and defense response to other organism. KEGG pathway analysis showed that the downregulated genes were associated with Steroid hormone biosynthesis, Peroxisome, Chemical carcinogenesis, proteasome, Oxidative phosphorylation and Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), whereas the upregulated genes were associated with Cell adhesion molecules (CAMs), Staphylococcus aureus infection, Viral protein interaction with cytokine and cytokine receptor, and Chemokine signaling pathway. Total RNA was extracted using Tripure Isolation Reagent (Roche, Mannheim, Germany) from livers of Mettl3 flox/flox and HKO mice at 8 weeks old (n=3 for each group). mRNA profiles were generated by deep sequencing using an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 platform. Paired-end clean reads were aligned to the mouse reference genome(Ensemble_grcm38_p6) with Hisat2 v2.0.5, and the aligned reads were used to quantify mRNA expression by using featureCounts v1.5.0-p3.