No Significant Difference between Plasma miRNAs and Plasma-Derived Exosomal miRNAs from Healthy People

Abstract

Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs that are involved in many biological regulation processes. Studies have reported that miRNAs are enriched in human plasma and plasma-derived exosome as novel diagnostic biomarkers. The aim of this study was to determine whether the miRNA expression levels are different between plasma and plasma-derived exosome.

Methods: We sequenced and quantified the miRNAs in plasma and exosome from healthy blood samples and validated three miRNAs in the two groups of lung cancer samples by qRT-PCR.

Results: The sequencing results showed that only several of miRNAs were differential, while the qRT-PCR further validated that most of them did not have the consistent differences. However, the levels of two upregulated miRNAs (miR-181b-5p and miR-21-5p) in lung cancer were significantly higher in exosomes than plasma.

Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to compare the expression levels of miRNAs between plasma and exosome in healthy blood samples. Our data suggested that the miRNA levels were similar in the two parts of the healthy people, whereas the two onco-miRNAs were significantly enriched in the exosome of lung cancer patients.

Figure 1

The 7 differential miRNAs between plasma and exosome in the healthy group by sequencing. The y-axis meant the value of TPM (transcripts per million) as log10. Among these miRNAs, 5 miRNAs were significantly upregulated in the plasma compared to exosome, and 2 miRNAs were downregulated (p value < 0.05).

Figure 2

The quantification results of plasma miRNAs and exosome miRNAs in the healthy samples. (a) The 7 differential miRNAs from sequencing: only 2 miRNAs (miR-193a-5p, miR-1-3p) had significant differences between plasma (blue) and exosome (green) (p value < 0.05). (b) The 5 nondifferential miRNAs: no differences in the qPCR results. The y-axis meant the value of ΔCt = AvgCt_miRNA − AvgCt_U6. The asterisk “∗” means the p value is less than 0.05 (<0.05).

Figure 3

The quantification results of 3 miRNAs between plasma and exosome in the lung cancer samples. MiR-181b-5p and miR-21-5p were significantly upregulated in exosome (green) than in plasma (blue, p value < 0.05), but miR-486-5p did not reveal the difference in these two groups. The y-axis meant the value of ΔCt = AvgCt_miRNA − AvgCt_U6. The asterisk “∗” means the p value is less than 0.05 (<0.05).