Fig. 1.

Effects of hepatic Ago2-deficiency on MD-miRNA expression in the liver. a–c A heatmap diagram illustrating the differential expression of hepatic mature miRNAs (a), raw counts of significant miRNAs normalized by DESeq2 and transformed by Log2 (b), and fold changes of significant miRNAs whose expression levels are in the top 10 percent in the WT liver (c) in the liver of L-Ago2 WT (n = 3) and L-Ago2 KO (n = 3) mice fed NCD at 9 weeks of age. Significant miRNAs differentially expressed between L-Ago2 WT and L-Ago2 KO groups were identified using DESeq2 (|fold change| > 2x and adjusted p < 0.05) and plotted as a heatmap using z-score. d Metabolic pathway enrichment analysis of miRNAs significantly downregulated (blue) and upregulated (red) miRNAs in the liver of L-Ago2 KO mice fed NCD at 9 weeks of age. These miRNAs were queried to calculate the most enriched KEGG pathways using DIANA-mirPath web-server (p < 0.05 and MicroT threshold < 0.8). Pathways unrelated to hepatic functions were excluded in this pyramid plot. e–g Expression levels of MD-miRNAs’ target mRNAs (e), selective MD-miRNAs (f), and their pri-miRNAs (g) in the liver of L-Ago2 WT (n = 8) and L-Ago2 KO (n = 8) mice fed NCD at 25 weeks of age. Data are shown as the mean ± SEM. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01