Identification of EV-responsive transcripts in the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea

The roles of extracellular vesicles in animal models of regeneration are poorly characterized. The goal of this study was to identify differentially expressed transcripts in planarian flatworms after injection of buffer only or extracellular vesicles compared to uninjected animals. Total RNA was isolated from planarian tail fragments (postpharyngeal region excluding ~10% of the posterior-most tail tip) 24 hours after EV injection, buffer injection, or no injection (5 tail fragments per replicate, 4 biological replicates per condition). Library generation (IDT xGen RNA library prep kit with NEB poly-A selection) and RNA sequencing (2x150bp paired-end, Illumina NovaSeq X Plus) were conducted by the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation Clinical Genomics Core. Bioinformatic analysis was conducted using BBDuk, Bowtie2, and edgeR.