Next Generation Sequencing Analysis of the Transcriptomes of Wild Type and ALKBH5-/- Peritoneal Macrophages

By performing RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) analysis on the peritoneal macrophages that derived from ALKBH5-/- mice and littermate mice infected with or without vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), we want to investigate whether deficiency of ALKBH5 controls viral replication through a more general mechanism such as enhancing innate response, and if not, what's the critical downstream target(s) of ALKBH5. RNA-seq analysis showed that mRNA expression of innate genes remained unchanged or not increased in ALKBH5-deficient cells. While thourgh KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of the RNA-seq data, we found that metabolic pathways were the ones most significantly affected in ALKBH5-deficient macrophages upon VSV infection. These results demonstrated that deficiency of ALKBH5 controls viral replication by significantly changing the metabolism-related genes expression. Transcriptomes profiles of gene expression changes in wild type and ALKBH5-/- peritoneal macrophages infected with or without VSV, two biological replicates.