Next Generation Sequencing Facilitates Quantitative Analysis of Thymic Transcriptomes from Wild Type and Mir-146a Transgenic Mice

Purpose: To find out the global transcriptomic change induced by overexpression of miR-146a in thymus Methods:Thymic mRNA profile of two pools from age (five to six-week old)- and gender (one male and one female for each pool)- matched wild-type (WT) and miR-146a transgenic (Tg) mice were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq 2500. The clean reads that passed quality filters were mapped against Mus musculus genome using HotHap2, and the only uniquely mapped reads were used to calculate reads per kilobase of exon per million fragment (RPKM) values for each sample. The transcript isoform with a fold-change over 2 and q<0.001 were considered differentially expressed. Conclusion: Our study identified 101 differently expressed transcripts in thymus from miR-146a Tg mice, including 56 down-regulated transcripts covering 49 genes which are the candidate targets of miR-146a Thymic mRNA profile of pools from WT and Tg mice were generated by deep sequencing using HiSeq 2500.