Project description:Purpose: The goal of this study was to characterize the kidney transcriptome of Mus musculus and Acomys cahirinus after unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO) kidney injury. Methods: Kidney mRNA-seq profiles of 10 week old mouse and spiny mouse were generated at 2 day and 5 days after unilateral ureteral obstruction injury in triplicate, using Illumina NovaSeq 6000. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed at the transcript isoform level with Salmon, edgeR and a limma-voom pipeline in R. Results: For both Mus musculus and Acomys cahirinus kidneys, we mapped about 50 million sequence reads per sample to the mouse transcriptome and identified 20580 transcripts in kidneys of Mus musculus and 54075 transcripts in the kidneys of Acomys cahirinus. Using 1.5 fold change and FDR < 0.05, number of transcripts that are significantly different between Mus musculus samples: 3915 between normal and day 2 after UUO, 5365 between normal and day 5 after UUO. For Acomys cahirinus: 1765 between normal and day 2 after UUO, 2499 between normal and day 5 after UUO. Conclusions: Our study demonstrate there were many conserved responses to kidney injury between M. musculus and A. cahirinus despite the divergent outcomes for kidney fibrosis.
Project description:In mammals, significant injury is generally followed by the formation of a fibrotic scar which provides structural integrity but fails to functionally restore damaged tissue. Spiny mice of the genus <i>Acomys</i> represent the first example of full skin autotomy in mammals. <i>Acomys cahirinus</i> has evolved extremely weak skin as a strategy to avoid predation and is able to repeatedly regenerate healthy tissue without scar after severe skin injury or full-thickness ear punches. Extracellular matrix (ECM) composition is a critical regulator of wound repair and scar formation and previous studies have suggested that alterations in its expression may be responsible for the differences in regenerative capacity observed between <i>Mus musculus</i> and <i>A. cahirinus</i>, yet analysis of this critical tissue component has been limited in previous studies by its insolubility and resistance to extraction. Here, we utilize a 2-step ECM-optimized extraction to perform proteomic analysis of tissue composition during wound repair after full-thickness ear punches in <i>A. cahirinus</i> and <i>M. musculus</i> from weeks 1 to 4 post-injury. We observe changes in a wide range of ECM proteins which have been previously implicated in wound regeneration and scar formation, including collagens, provisional matrix and coagulation proteins, and matricryptic signaling peptides. We additionally report differences in crosslinking enzyme activity and ECM protein solubility between <i>Mus</i> and <i>Acomys</i>. Furthermore, we observed rapid and sustained increases in CD206, a marker of pro-regenerative M2 macrophages, in <i>Acomys</i>, whereas little or no increase in CD206 was detected in <i>Mus</i>. Together, these findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding of tissue cues which drive the regenerative capacity of <i>Acomys</i> and identify a number of potential targets for future pro-regenerative therapies.