Briefly, the L3-5 DRG segments ipsilateral to the side of the ankle sprain injury were harvested and used for generating libraries for RNA-Seq. On day 14, mice were anesthetized with sodium pentobarbital and were perfused with saline. After perfusion, the L3-5 DRG segments were immediately preserved in RNAlater solution (Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA). Total RNA was extracted using Trizol reagent (Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA) according to the manufacturer's instructions with DNaseI to degrade contaminating DNA. The purity and concentration of the samples were assessed by the Nanodrop Spectrophotometer (NanoDrop Products, CA, USA), and the RNA integrity was assessed by the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent Technologies, Palo Alto, CA) RNA libraries were prepared for sequencing using standard Illumina protocols