Figure 1.

The entire research process is presented. The right sciatic nerves of 15 C57Bl6 mice were crushed using an acutenaculum. To screen key time points for Wallerian degeneration, sciatic functional index (SFI) was performed on the mice. A microarray analysis was performed on 72 mice to detect the expression of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the distal segment of the sciatic nerve at 0, 3, 7 and 14 days following injury. Bioinformatic approaches including sample clustering, gene ontology (GO) analysis, and target prediction were performed to investigate the functions of these dysregulated lncRNAs. RT-qPCR was performed on another 12 mice to verify the predicted lncRNA-mRNA pairs. d, day; DE, differentially expressed.