Whole-transcriptome sequencing analysis of streptozocin-induced diabetic and non-diabetic control rats
Diabetes mellitus is a complex metabolic disorder. Long-term hyperglycemia may induce diabetic keratopathy, which is mainly characterized by decreased tear secretion, damaged innervation, weakened cell junctions, and impaired wound healing responses. To investigate the differential expressed genes in the regulation of diabetic keratopathy, we established streptozocin-induced diabetic and non-diabetic control male Brown Norway rats. Total RNA was extracted from the corneal epithelium rats, and were subjected to whole-transcriptome sequencing analysis. Firstly, Cutadapt was used to remove the reads that contained adaptor contamination, low quality bases and undetermined bases. Then sequence quality was verified using FastQC(http://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/projects/fastqc/). We used Bowtie2 and Hisat2to map reads to the genome from corneal epithelium of streptozocin-induced diabetic and non-diabetic control rats. The mapped reads of each sample were assembled using String Tie. Then, all transcriptomes from corneal epithelium Samples were merged to reconstruct a comprehensive transcriptome using perl scripts. We then performed gene expression profiling analysis using data obtained from RNA-seq of 6 corneas from STZ-induced diabetic rats and 6 corneas from normal controls. Overall design: mRNA profiles form corneal epithelium of 16-weeks streptozocin-induced diabetic and non-diabetic control rats corneal epithelium