RESEARCH ARTICLE Expression Pattern of Inflammatory Response Genes and Their Regulatory MicroRNAs in Bovine Oviductal Cells in Response to Lipopolysaccharide: Implication

In the present study, we used an in vitromodel to investigate the response of the oviduct with respect to inflammatory mediators and their regulatory microRNAs in case of bacterial infection and subsequent association with embryo survival. For this, we conducted two ex-periments. In the first experiment, cultured primary bovine oviductal cells (BOEC) were chal-lenged with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) for 24h and the temporal expression pattern of inflammatory mediators and their regulatory microRNAs were measured at 0, 3, 6, 12, 24 and 48h after LPS treatment. Intriguingly, the temporal patterns of all miRNAs except miR-21 were significantly up-regulated at 6h after LPS treatment. Whereas, we observed signifi-cant overexpression of pro-inflammatory mediators as tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) and interleukin-1 beta (IL1β) after LPS challenge for 24h. On the other hand, the expression level of essential elements like oviductal glycoprotein 1 (OVGP1) and insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) was significantly decreased in challenged groups compared with control. Moreover, miR-155, miR-146a, miR-223, miR-21, miR-16 and miR-215 have shown a clear suppression in challenged group after LPS treatment. In the 2nd experiment there were fou