The effects of WTAP on heart development [WTAPCKO]

The goal of this study is to investigate how WTAP regulates heart development. Overall design: mRNA profiles in the hearts of Wtapflox/flox and Wtap-CKO mice were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina Novaseq 6000 platform (n=3 for each group). Total RNA was extracted using Tripure Isolation Reagent (Roche, Mannheim, Germany) from the hearts of Wtapflox/flox and Wtap-CKO mice at 4 days old. Three independent biological replicates for each group were used for RNA-seq. RNA-seq was performed by deep sequencing using an Illumina Novaseq 6000 platform. Paired-end clean reads were aligned to the mouse reference genome(GRCm39) with Hisat2 v2.0.5, and the aligned reads were used to quantify mRNA expression by using featureCounts v1.5.0-p3. Our study represents the first detailed analysis of heart transcriptomes from Wtapflox/flox and Wtap-CKO mice, generated by RNA-seq technology. The RNA-seq analysis showed that 2348 genes were downregulated and 2764 genes were upregulated in the hearts of Wtap-CKO mice.