Next Generation Sequencing of zebrafish V2a interneurons in spinal segments rostral to the lesion after spinal cord injury

The goals of this study is to compare transcriptome profiles (RNA-seq) of zebrafish V2a interneurons with regrown axon and those without regrown axon in the spinal segments rostral to the lesion after spinal cord injury. For purification of V2a interneurons with regrown axon, the fluorescent tracer Rhodamine Dextran (RD) was retrogradely applied to Tg(Chx10:GFP) fish at three or eight weeks post injury. Spinal cord segments rostral to the lesion site was collected from 20 fish at 3- or 8 wpi, and corresponding spinal cord segments from 20 uninjured fish were collected as control material. GFP+/RD+ and GFP+/RD- cells were FAC-sorted and subjected to RNA-sequencing. Total RNA was isolated using SMART-SeqTM v4 UltraTM Low Input RNA Kit for Sequencing (Clontech). Sequencing libraries (N=5-6) were generated using NEBNext UltraTM RNA Library Prep Kit for Illumina following the manufacturer’s instructions (NEB). We mapped about 40-80 million sequence reads per sample to the zebrafish genome and identified 42,370 transcripts in the zebrafish V2a interneurons in the spinal cord. Our study represents the detailed analysis of transcriptomes of zebrafish V2a interneurons with regrown axon and those without regrown axon in the spinal segments rostral to the lesion after spinal cord injury. For purification of V2a interneurons with regrown axon, the fluorescent tracer Rhodamine Dextran (RD) was retrogradely applied to Tg(Chx10:GFP) fish at three or eight weeks post injury. Spinal cord segments rostral to the lesion site was collected from 20 fish at 3- or 8 wpi, and corresponding spinal cord segments from 20 uninjured fish were collected as control material. GFP+/RD+ and GFP+/RD- cells were FAC-sorted and subjected to RNA-sequencing. Total RNA was extracted and cDNA libraries (N=5-6) were subjected to Illumina sequencing according to the manufacturer’s instructions.