Abstract
Neuropathic pain (NP) is a common debilitating chronic pain condition with limited effective therapeutics. Further investigating mechanisms underlying NP is therefore of great importance for discovering more promising therapeutic targets. In the current study, we employed high-throughput RNA sequencing to explore transcriptome profiles of mRNAs and microRNAs in the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) following chronic constriction injury (CCI) and also integrated published datasets for comprehensive analysis. First, we established CCI rat model confirmed by behavioral testings, and excavated 467 differentially expressed mRNAs (DEGs) and 16 differentially expressed microRNAs (DEmiRNAs) in the ipsilateral lumbar 4-6 DRG of CCI rats 11 days after surgery. Functional enrichment analysis of 337 upregulated DEGs showed that most of the DEGs were enriched in inflammation- and immune-associated biological processes and signaling pathways. The protein-protein interaction networks were constructed and hub DEGs were screened. Besides hub DEGs, we also identified 113 overlapped DEGs by intersecting our dataset with dataset GSE100122. Subsequently, we predicted potential miRNA-mRNA regulatory pairs using DEmiRNAs and a given set of key DEGs (including hub and overlapped DEGs). By integrative analysis, we found commonly differentially expressed mRNAs and miRNAs following CCI of different time points and different nerve injury types. Highlighted mRNAs include Atf3, Vip, Gal, Npy, Adcyap1, Reg3b, Jun, Cd74, Gadd45a, Tgm1, Csrp3, Sprr1a, Serpina3n, Gap43, Serpinb2 and Vtcn1, while miRNAs include miR-21-5p, miR-34a-5p, miR-200a-3p, miR-130a-5p, miR-216b-5p, miR-217-5p, and miR-541-5p. Additionally, 15 DEGs, including macrophages-specific (Cx3cr1, Arg1, Cd68, Csf1r) and the ones related to macrophages' involvement in NP (Ccl2, Fcgr3a, Bdnf, Ctss, Tyrobp) were verified by qRT-PCR. By functional experiments in future studies, promising therapeutic targets for NP treatment may be identified among these mRNAs and miRNAs.