Transcriptional profiling in the livers of rats after hypobaric hypoxia exposure

PeerJ

article

Zhenguo Xu¹  Zhilong Jia¹  Jinlong Shi¹  Zeyu Zhang¹  Xiaojian Gao¹  Qian Jia²  Bohan Liu²  Jixuan Liu¹  Chunlei Liu¹  Xiaojing Zhao¹  Kunlun He¹ 

[1] Laboratory of Translational Medicine, Chinese PLA General Hospital;Beijing Key Laboratory of Chronic Heart Failure Precision Medicine, Chinese PLA General Hospital

关键词: Hypobaric hypoxia;    Rat model;    Mountain sickness;    Transcriptional analysis;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.6499

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

Ascent to high altitude feels uncomfortable in part because of a decreased partial pressure of oxygen due to the decrease in barometric pressure. The molecular mechanisms causing injury in liver tissue after exposure to a hypoxic environment are widely unknown. The liver must physiologically and metabolically change to improve tolerance to altitude-induced hypoxia. Since the liver is the largest metabolic organ and regulates many physiological and metabolic processes, it plays an important part in high altitude adaptation. The cellular response to hypoxia results in changes in the gene expression profile. The present study explores these changes in a rat model. To comprehensively investigate the gene expression and physiological changes under hypobaric hypoxia, we used genome-wide transcription profiling. Little is known about the genome-wide transcriptional response to acute and chronic hypobaric hypoxia in the livers of rats. In this study, we carried out RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) of liver tissue from rats in three groups, normal control rats (L), rats exposed to acute hypobaric hypoxia for 2 weeks (W2L) and rats chronically exposed to hypobaric hypoxia for 4 weeks (W4L), to explore the transcriptional profile of acute and chronic mountain sickness in a mammal under a controlled time-course. We identified 497 differentially expressed genes between the three groups. A principal component analysis revealed large differences between the acute and chronic hypobaric hypoxia groups compared with the control group. Several immune-related and metabolic pathways, such as cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction and galactose metabolism, were highly enriched in the KEGG pathway analysis. Similar results were found in the Gene Ontology analysis. Cogena analysis showed that the immune-related pathways were mainly upregulated and enriched in the acute hypobaric hypoxia group.

【 授权许可】

CC BY