A comprehensive expression profile of micrornas in rat's pituitary

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small, non-coding RNA molecules that act as a negative regulator of most mRNAs. miRNAs influence the gene expression as transcriptional regulators and play an important role in many fundamental biological processes. It is generally acknowledged that miRNAs have a very important affection on mammalian pituitary. However, the answers of which role miRNAs play in the development of sexual function or how much they contribute to the pituitary function are not exactly. In our study, we used three female 21-day-old rats and three female 12-month-old rats to analysis the function of miRNAs. By the analyses of microarray data, we finished the stem-loop real-time RT-PCR for the differentially expressed miRNAs. We detected a total of 93 differentially expressed miRNAs between 21-day-old rats' pituitary and 12-month-old rats'. Stem-loop real-time RT-PCR suggests that the obtained data is of high credibility. Among these miRNAs, 7 miRNAs' expression (rno-miR-880, rno-miR-503, rno-miR-125a-3p, rno-miR-3596b, rno-miR-30e, rno-miR-214 and rno-miR-22) are significant different (P≤0.05). In a word, this study identified a number of specific changes in the expression of miRNAs, in rats by detecting the expression profile of miRNAs in rat's pituitary, and all of that lay the foundation for elucidating the regulatory mechanisms of miRNAs in rat's reproduction process. These differentially expressed miRNAs may play a very important role in rat's reproduction process.