Figure 4.

Boxplots of differentially expressed miRNAs in exosomes isolated from 14-week male BALB/c and NOD mouse serum. Reads were aligned with Bowtie and an in-house brute force-based aligner, and differential gene expression analysis was conducted using DESEq2, EdgeR, and LimmaVoom in RStudio. (A) Both DESeq2 and LimmaVoom identified miR-127-3p, miR-409-3p, and miR-540-3p as “hits” with p_adj < 0.05. (B) Additionally, LimmaVoom identified miR-410-3p and miR-541-5p to be dysregulated with p_adj < 0.05. miR-329-5p failed to reach statistical significance due to one outlier but exhibited the highest fold change with Log₂FC > 5 in EdgeR and DESEq2. Results were obtained from data sets generated from small RNA sequencing of 5 sets of RNA from exosomes from each mouse cohort, each isolated from purified pooled serum exosomes from five groups of age-, gender-, and strain-matched mice, with 5 mice per group.