RNA-seq Analysis of Dental Pulp in Rats Under Different Sleep conditions

This study aims to investigate genes from dental pulp tissue regulated by sleep deprived Twelve eight-week-old male Sprague-Dawley rats (specific pathogen-free grade) were randomly assigned to either sleep deprivation group or control group (n=6 per group). Under sterile conditions in a laminar flow hood, the complete dental pulp tissues were aseptically extracted from the mandibular first molars. Preliminary experiments revealed that the rat dental pulp tissues had limited mass (approximately 4–5 mg per tooth) and yielded insufficient RNA quantities (<200 ng per sample) for individual library preparation. To address this, we employed an intra-group equal pooling strategy, combining six independent biological replicates per group into a single pooled sample (1 pool per group). Subsequent paired-end sequencing was performed using the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 platform.