Abstract:

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is considered to be one of the most devastating effects of all neurological diseases. The pathophysiological mechanisms of SCI involve central nervous system injury of the various signaling pathways. During our previous study, we found that microRNA-21a-5p (miR-21a-5p) plays a significant role in SCI to improve the recovery of motor function after spinal cord injury in a mouse model. In this study, we utilized the proteomics approach to understand the role of different proteins expressed in miR-21a-5p knockdown (KD) and their functions as compare to the negative control group (NC). We found that after introducing miR-21a-5p, most of the proteins that play an essential role in regulation of inflammatory processes, cell protection against oxidative stress, cell redox homeostasis and cell maintenance were upregulated in comparison to the NC group. We investigated different enriched pathways generated via the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). Enriched pathways were found in both groups, such as the oxidative phosphorylation pathway, which is relevant to Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and cardiac muscle contraction. We also found that miR-21a-5p could be a potential biomarker in the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis pathway (ALS), as miR-21a-5p becomes deregulated in this pathway. This study helps to give an overview of the significant proteins and their potential role in SCI. It will be helpful gateway to study these proteins and their co-relation in the recovery of spinal cord injury and can be a useful biomarker in future studies.

Key words:  Spinal cord injury, microRNA, proteomic analysis, miR-21a-5p