Chronic pain is a common and devastating condition that induces well-characterized changes in neurons and microglia. One major unanswered question is why these changes should persist long after the precipitating injury has healed. Here, we suggest that some of the longer-lasting consequences of nerve injury may be hidden in the epigenome. Cell sorting and sequencing techniques were used to characterize the spinal cord immune response in a mouse model of chronic neuropathic pain. Infiltration of peripheral myeloid cells was found to be absent, and RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) of central microglia revealed transient gene expression changes in response to nerve ligation. Conversely, examination of microglial enhancers revealed persistent, post-injury alterations in close proximity to transcriptionally regulated genes. Enhancers are regions of open chromatin that define a cell's transcription factor binding profile. We hypothesize that changes at enhancers may constitute a mechanism by which painful experiences are recorded at a molecular level.
Pubmed ID: 27184839 RIS Download
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Software platform for complex network analysis and visualization. Used for visualization of molecular interaction networks and biological pathways and integrating these networks with annotations, gene expression profiles and other state data.
View all literature mentionsQuality control software that perform checks on raw sequence data coming from high throughput sequencing pipelines. This software also provides a modular set of analyses which can give a quick impression of the quality of the data prior to further analysis.
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