Effects of biometals in regulating liver transcriptomes

Four trace elements, Zn, Mn, Se and Fe were used to treat primary hepatocytes isolated from a ZIP8 liver-specific mouse line to study whether they can rescue the gene changes caused by loss of ZIP8 function. Eight total samples were analyzed for the purpose of this study; there were four controls: two untreated WT primary hepatocytes (replicates) and two untreated ZIP8-liver specific knockout primary hepatocytes cultures (replicates). The other four samples were ZIP8-liver specific knockout hepatocytes treated with different divalent metals of interest (manganese, iron, selenium, zinc), which is added to a final concentrations of 2uM, for overnight treatment. The total RNA was isolated from primary cultured hepatocytes and submitted for RNA-seq. The cDNA was synthesized by Genewiz. One-tail RNA-seq was performed at 500 million counts. All quality control analysis, read alignment, and read counting were performed on a high-performance computing environment on a Linux operating system hosted by The Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research at Michigan State University.