Spiny mice (Acomys cahirinus) activate unique transcriptional programs after severe kidney injuries and regenerate organ function without fibrosis

Purpose: The goal of this study was to characterize the kidney transcriptome of Mus musculus and Acomys cahirinus after unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO) kidney injury.Methods: Kidney mRNA-seq profiles of 10 week old mouse and spiny mouse were generated at 2 day and 5 days after unilateral ureteral obstruction injury in triplicate, using Illumina NovaSeq 6000. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed at the transcript isoform level with Salmon, edgeR and a limma-voom pipeline in R.Results: For both Mus musculus and Acomys cahirinus kidneys, we mapped about 50 million sequence reads per sample to the mouse transcriptome and identified 20580 transcripts in kidneys of Mus musculus and 54075 transcripts in the kidneys of Acomys cahirinus. Using 1.5 fold change and FDR < 0.05, number of transcripts that are significantly different between Mus musculus samples: 3915 between normal and day 2 after UUO, 5365 between normal and day 5 after UUO. For Acomys cahirinus: 1765 between normal and day 2 after UUO, 2499 between normal and day 5 after UUO.Conclusions: Our study demonstrate there were many conserved responses to kidney injury between M. musculus and A. cahirinus despite the divergent outcomes for kidney fibrosis.