Poster #015, University of California, Riverside
PANDORA-Seq Reveals Cholesterol-Responsive Macrophage tsRNAs Associated with Inflammatory Activation During Atherosclerosis
Mentors: Changcheng Zhou, PhD; Sijie Tang, MD; Jianfei Pan, PhD
Atherosclerosis is a disease in which inflammation contributes to the buildup of plaques inside blood vessels. Macrophages are immune cells that play an important role in this inflammatory process. Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are best known for their role in protein synthesis, where they carry amino acids to the ribosome to help build proteins. Transfer RNA-derived small RNAs (tsRNAs) are a recently discovered class of small RNA molecules produced when tRNAs are cut into smaller fragments. Unlike their parent tRNAs, these fragments do not build proteins directly; instead, they can act as independent signals that help turn specific genes on or off. Although tsRNAs are known to regulate gene expression in this way, their effects on macrophage inflammation are not well understood. In this project, we investigated whether selected tsRNAs influence inflammatory gene expression in macrophages. Synthetic tsRNAs were transfected into cultured macrophages, and the expression of inflammatory genes was measured using quantitative real-time PCR. We found that several tsRNAs altered the expression of inflammation-related genes compared with control cells, suggesting that tsRNAs can regulate macrophage inflammatory responses. These findings provide insight into how small RNAs influence immune cell function and may improve our understanding of inflammation in cardiovascular disease.