Project description:This study looks at the effect of dietary manipulation on the development of hepatic steatosis and changes in hepatic gene expression in a feline model. We used microarray analysis to examine changes in hepatic gene transcription in response to Trans fat, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) and/or Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) in the domestic cat. The use of human Affymetrix arrays for the study of feline gene expression has previously been validated by Dowling and Bienzle, 2005, Journal of General Virology. 86(Pt 8), 2239-48 (PMID 16033971). Our study animals were bred from female Felis catus previously placed on one of 4 different dietary regimens for a period of 3 weeks prior to mating. The four dietary regimens used in this study were: [1] Standard Chow Control feline diet (Test Diet Purina catalog #5003); [2] MSG diet consisting of Control diet with 1.125% added Monosodium Glutamate (Diet A: Test Diet Purina catalog #5C1J); [3] Trans-fat/HFCS diet, containing 8.6% Trans fat and 24% HFCS (Diet B: Test Diet Purina catalog #5B4K); and [4] Trans-fat/HFCS and MSG diet, containing 8.6% Trans fat, 24% HFCS and 1.125% MSG (Diet C: Test Diet Purina catalog #5C1H). Following mating, the 4 groups of dams were maintained on their respective diets throughout the gestation and nursing period. Male offspring used in the following experiments were weaned onto the same diets and maintained on their respective dietary regimens until they reached 9 months of age. Hepatic tissues (4-5 per diet group) were used for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays.
Project description:MicroRNAs are conserved, endogenous small RNAs with critical post-transcriptional regulatory functions throughout eukaryota, including prominent roles in development and disease. Despite much effort, microRNA annotations still contain errors and are incomplete due especially to challenges related to identifying valid miRs that have small numbers of reads, to properly locating hairpin precursors and to balancing precision and recall. Here, we present miRWoods, which solves these challenges using a duplex-focused precursor detection method and stacked random forests with specialized layers to detect mature and precursor microRNAs, and has been tuned to optimize the harmonic mean of precision and recall. We trained and tuned our discovery pipeline on data sets from the well-annotated human genome, and evaluated its performance on data from mouse. Compared to existing approaches, miRWoods better identifies precursor spans, and can balance sensitivity and specificity for an overall greater prediction accuracy, recalling an average of 10% more annotated microRNAs, and correctly predicts substantially more microRNAs with only one read. We apply this method to the under-annotated genomes of Felis catus (domestic cat) and Bos taurus (cow). We identified hundreds of novel microRNAs in small RNA sequencing data sets from muscle and skin from cat, from 10 tissues from cow and also from human and mouse cells. Our novel predictions include a microRNA in an intron of tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) that is present in both cat and cow, as well as a family of mirtrons with two instances in the human genome. Our predictions support a more expanded miR-2284 family in the bovine genome, a larger mir-548 family in the human genome, and a larger let-7 family in the feline genome.