Cardiac transcriptome in iron-deficiency anemia

Purpose: The goal of this study was to probe for the effects of iron-deficiency anemia on the cardiac transciprtome using RNA-seq Methods: C57B6 mice were weaned onto a control or iron-deficient diet for 6 weeks. Hearts were removed and total mRNA was submitted for RNA-seq. Sequencing data was aligned using STAR and differetial gene expression analysis conducted in R using EdgeR and DESeq2. qRT–PCR validation for genes of interest was performed using TaqMan and SYBR Green assays. Results: We mapped about 24 million sequence reads per sample to the mouse genome (build mm10) and identified 13,590 transcripts in the hearts of control and iron-deficient mice after removing lowly expressed genes and PCR duplicates. Differential gene expression analysis showed approximately 78% downregulated and 22% upregulated genes in iron-deficiency anemia compared to controls. PCA plot showed control and iron-deficient hearts clustering in two distinct and separate clusters. Conclusions: Our study represents the first whole-transcriptomic study on cardiac samples obtained from iron-deficient and anemic mice, with biologic replicates, generated by RNA-seq technology. The RNA-seq data presented here can be used by others to explore which pathways are affected by iron-deficiency anemia Cardiac mRNA from control and iron-deficient anemic mice (males)