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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 3|pp 2798—2813

Functional lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA networks in rabbit carotid atherosclerosis

Yingnan Wu1, Feng Zhang2, Rui Lu1, Yanan Feng1, Xiaoying Li1, Shuang Zhang1, Wenying Hou3, Jiawei Tian1, Xianchao Kong4, Litao Sun5
  • 1Department of Ultrasound, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, Heilongjiang, China
  • 2Department of Ultrasound, The First Affiliated Hospital of Xiamen University, Xiamen 361003, Fujian, China
  • 3Department of Ultrasound, Xuanwu Hospital Capital University, Beijing 100053, China
  • 4Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, Heilongjiang, China
  • 5Department of Ultrasound, Shenzhen University General Hospital, Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, China
* Equal contribution
Received: April 9, 2019Accepted: January 19, 2020Published: February 11, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102778

Copyright: © 2020 Wu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is one of the most common clinical cardiovascular disorders. Accumulating evidence indicates that lncRNAs exert critical functions in atherosclerosis; however, their functional roles and regulatory mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we induced atherosclerotic plaques in three rabbit carotid arteries through an atherogenic diet and balloon injury; three age-matched rabbits were fed normal chow and served as controls. We thoroughly investigated the RNA (mRNA, lncRNA and miRNA) expression profiles in atherosclerotic rabbit carotid models with deep RNA sequencing. We identified several significantly differentially expressed RNAs. The corresponding lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA network was constructed, and the significantly dysregulated network was selected. Furthermore, Gene Ontology and  Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses indicated that the mRNAs in the network were involved in leukocyte activation, cell proliferation, cell adhesion molecules and cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction. After rigorous screening, we obtained a differentially expressed lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA interaction network associated with atherosclerosis. In the network, XLOC_054118 and XLOC_030217 upregulate the CHI3L1, SOAT, CTSB and CAPG genes by competitively binding to the miRNA ocu-miR-96-5p. XLOC_062719 and XLOC_063297 upregulate CTSS, CTSB and EDNRA genes by competitively binding to the miRNA ocu-miR-185-5p.