Identification of novel microRNAs in the sheep heart and their regulation in heart failure

Study of microRNA (miRNAs) using sheep models is limited due to lack of miRNA information. We therefore investigated oar-miRNAs and their regulation in an ovine model of heart failure (HF). Left ventricular (LV) tissue was collected from normal (Cont), HF (LV pacing @ ~220bpm for 13-days) and HF-recovery sheep (HF-R, 26-days after pacing cessation). MiRNA expression was profiled using next-generation sequencing (NGS) and miRNA array, and validated by stem-loop qPCR. Detected sequences were mapped against the ovine genome (Oar v4.0) and aligned with known miRNAs (miRBase v21). A total of 36,438,340 raw reads were obtained with a peak distribution of 18–23 nt. Of these, 637 miRNAs were detected by NGS and mapped to the ovine genome. With cut-off at 10 counts, 275 novel miRNAs were identified (with 186 showing 100% alignment and 89 showing 70–99% alignment with human/mouse and/or rat miRNAs, respectively), and 78 known oar-miRNAs. Cardiac-enriched miRNA-1, -133a, -208a/b and -499 were highly expressed in the LV. With HF induction, miRNA-133b-3p, -208b-3p, -125a-5p, -125b-5p, -126-3p, -21-5p, -210-3p, -29a-3p, -320a and -494-3p were significantly up-regulated relative to Cont and tended to return to normal levels following HF-recovery. This study has expanded the sheep miRNA database, and demonstrated HF-induced regulation of miRNAs.