Project description:Detection of Acute Radiation Sickness: A Feasibility Study in Non-human Primates Circulating miRNAs for triage in Radiological Events
Project description:In the current study, we investigated the gene expression response of blood cells of non-human primates that were whole thorax irradiated with a 10.1 Gy total dose. Partial irradiation of the NHP in the upper half of the body allows study of late radiation lung injury while avoiding acute respiratory syndromes related to hematopoietic and gastrointestinal injury. In this study, we report gene expression changes in the peripheral blood, an easily biopsied tissue, up to a month after radiation injury to the lungs. We isolated total RNA from peripheral blood at 3 days before irradiation, and then from the same animals on days 2, 5 and 30 after irradiation. Using Agilent Human Whole Genome microarrays, we identified 1187 genes that were significantly differentially expressed across the 30-day time course of this study. We identified common biological functions affected that persisted across the 30-day study, such as immune response. Response to oxygen-containing compounds and bacterial molecules were implicated by the gene expression changes at both the earliest day 2 and last, day 30 time-point and suggest that although cells are being recycled through the body in a 30-day time course after exposure to irradiation, the damage to blood cells and immunity, specifically the response to infections might persist throughout the study .
Project description:MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that are critical in post-transcriptional regulation. According to the latest miRBase (v22), there are 617 annotated pre-miRNAs in Macaca mulatta, which is much less than 1917 in human, although both of these two species are primates. To improve the annotation of miRNAs in Macaca mulatta, we generated 12 small RNA profiles from 8 tissues and perform comprehensive analysis of these profiles. We identified 613 conserved pre-miRNAs that have not been reported in Macaca mulatta and 25 novel miRNAs. Furthermore, we identified 996 editing sites with significant editing levels from 250 pre-miRNAs after analyzing the 12 self-generated and 58 additional published sRNA-seq profiles from different types of organs or tissues. Our results show that the distribution of different miRNA editing types in Macaca mulatta is different from that in human brains. Particularly, there are much more small indel events in miRNAs of Macaca mulatta than in human brains. These results significantly increase our understanding of miRNAs and their editing events in Macaca mulatta.