Bulk RNA-seq analysis of gene expression changes at 8 hpf induced by miR-34a loss

Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) is a disorder due to inherited mutations in the TP53 gene resulting in an increased risk of developing several types of cancer. MicroRNA miR-34a has been implicated downstream of p53 on the basis of being a direct transcriptional target and, when over-expressed, having pro-apoptotic phenotypes in cell lines. Moreover, miR-34a has been shown to be a modifier gene in the context of LFS, since its epigenetic silencing increases the likelihood of tumour development in patients with mutant TP53. However, the in vivo consequences of miR-34 loss are still unclear. For example, mice lacking all three (a,b,c) miR-34 homologs show no detectable abnormalities in p53 responses. The relative expression of different miR-34 genes in zebrafish was studied using qRT-PCR with specific assays. The miR-34a, miR-34b and miR-34c display unique onset of developmental expression and expression levels, with miR-34a being the most abundant and constant in expression. All of the miR-34 genes also showed clear induction by p53 when DNA-damaging treatments are performed. Using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, we generated a zebrafish miR-34a deletion mutant to further investigate the roles of miR-34a on its own and its association with the p53 pathway. Predictably, a miR-34a deletion mutant demonstrated absence of miR-34a, though without miR-34b and miR-34c compensation beyond baseline expression levels. Mutants survive to adulthood, show no overt phenotypes and have normal apoptotic responses to DNA-damaging irradiation or camptothecin treatments. To further explore the effects of miR-34a, we performed gene expression profiling using RNA-seq of wild-type and miR-34a deletion mutant zebrafish embryos at 8 hpf. This experiment was motivated by a previous report knock-down of miR-34a in zebrafish leads to dramatic increases in expression of miR-34a target genes. We therefore expected that this experiment will help define the set of miR-34a target genes. The results of this RNA-seq experiment showed that the loss of miR-34a led to large transcriptomic effects at 8 hpf (1573 genes UP and 1679 genes DOWN at 1.5-fold change and FDR < 0.05). There was no significant enrichment of predicted miR-34a target genes among the differentially regulated genes but some interesting biological trends were found and will be described in the paper associated with this dataset. Zebrafish embryos at 8 hpf of wild-type (casper) and miR-34a-/- genotypes (4 groups of 30 embryos each) were dechorionated, flash-frozen followed by RNA extraction from all samples.