Expressão diferencial de genes circadianos em ratos Wistar e em modelo experimental de epilepsia do lobo temporal

Abstract

The molecular mechanisms underlying epileptogenesis have been widely investigated by differential gene expression approach, especially RT-qPCR methodology. However, controversial findings highlight the occurrence of unpredictable sources of variance in the experimental designs. Here, we investigated if daily rhythms of transcript’s levels may impact on differential gene expression analysis in hippocampus of epileptic rats. For this, we have selected six core clock genes (Per1, Per3, Bmal1, Clock, Cry1 and Cry2), whose rhythmic expression pattern in hippocampus had been previously reported. Initially, we identified Tubb2a/Rplp1 and Tubb2a/Ppia as suitable normalizers for circadian studies in hippocampus of rats maintained to 12:12 hour light:dark (LD) cycle. Next, we confirmed the temporal profiling of Per1, Per3, Bmal1, Cry1 and Cry2 mRNA levels in the hippocampus of naïve rats by both Acrophase and CircWave statistical tests for circadian analysis. We showed that temporal differences of sampling can change experimental results for Per1, Per3, Bmal1, Cry1 and Cry2, but not for Clock, which was consistently decreased in epileptic rats in all comparison to the naive group. Finally, we observed that Gfap showed daily variation of transcript levels, and once again the differences in the times of the experiments influence the results. In conclusion, our study demonstrates that daily oscillation can lead to erroneous conclusions in gene expression analysis in hippocampus of epileptic rats. Investigators, therefore, should be aware that genes with circadian expression could be out of phase in different animals of experimental and control groups. Moreover, our results indicate that a sub-expression of Clock may be involved in epileptogenicity, although the functional significance of this remains to be investigated.