Transcriptomic architecture of the porcine liver responding to Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) and medicinal herb dietary treatments
The pigs were on a standard basal diet for 7 days of adaptation prior to assigning to the dietary treatments.The supplementation of medicinal herbs was provided to the pigs at the age of 42 days, while AFB1 was administered from day 56 until the end of experiment, 70 day old. The pigs were slaughtered and the liver samples were collected, snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen and kept at -80 Â°C until the analysis. Total RNA was extracted from liver samples. Approximately 40 mg of frozen liver sample was added into TRI Reagent and homogenized using tissue homogenizer.  RNA extraction was performed using a Phenol/chloroform protocol and NucleoSpin RNA kit was used for RNA purification .  RNA concentrations were determined using NanoDrop 2000 spectrophotometer. The RNA integrity was assessed using an Agilent RNA 6000 Nano Kit.  Total RNA of one microgram (RIN > 7) was used for library preparation using an Illumina Stranded mRNA Prep, Ligation kit with a 10 PCR-cycle of amplification according to the manufacture's recommendation (Illumina). The libraries were quality checked on Bionalyzer for fragment length distribution and normalized to an equal concentration of 10nM prior to pooling.