Unraveling the rat blood genome-wide transcriptome after oral administration of lavender oil by a two-color dye-swap DNA microarray approach

Lavender oil (LO) is a commonly used essential oil in aromatherapy as non-traditional medicine. With an aim to demonstrate LO effects on the body, we have recently established an animal model investigating the influence of orally administered LO in rat tissues, genome-wide. In this brief, we investigate the effect of LO ingestion in the blood of rat. Rats were administered LO at usual therapeutic dose (5 mg/kg) in humans, and following collection of the venous blood from the heart and extraction of total RNA, the differentially expressed genes were screened using a 4 × 44-K whole-genome rat chip (Agilent microarray platform; Agilent Technologies, Palo Alto, CA, USA) in conjunction with a two-color dye-swap approach. A total of 834 differentially expressed genes in the blood were identified: 362 up-regulated and 472 down-regulated. These genes were functionally categorized using bioinformatics tools. The gene expression inventory of rat blood transcriptome under LO, a first report, has been deposited into the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO): GSE67499. The data will be a valuable resource in examining the effects of natural products, and which could also serve as a human model for further functional analysis and investigation.