Comparative transcriptome analysis of inner blood-retinal barrier and blood–brain barrier in rats

• Published in: Scientific reports 2021-06, Vol.11 (1), p.12151-12151, Article 12151
• Main Authors: Li, Y., Faiz, A., Moshage, H., Schubert, R., Schilling, L., Kamps, J. A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 631/208/199; 692/4017; Blood-brain barrier; Diabetes mellitus; DNA microarrays; Gene expression; Humanities and Social Sciences; Microvasculature; multidisciplinary; Retina; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Transcription; Transcriptomes
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-91584-7

Although retinal microvessels (RMVs) and brain microvessels (BMVs) are closely related in their developmental and share similar blood-neural barriers, studies have reported markedly different responses to stressors such as diabetes. Therefore, we hypothesized that RMVs and BMVs will display substantial differences in gene expression levels even though they are of the same embryological origin. In this study, both RMVs and BMVs were mechanically isolated from rats. Full retinal and brain tissue samples (RT, BT) were collected for comparisons. Total RNA extracted from these four groups were processed on Affymetrix rat 2.0 microarray Chips. The transcriptional profiles of these tissues were then analyzed. In the present paper we looked at differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in RMVs (against RT) and BMVs (against BT) using a rather conservative threshold value of ≥  ± twofold change and a false discovery rate corrected for multiple comparisons ( p