Purpose: We used RNA sequencing to investigate the effect of needling treatments on GB20 acupoint in EAE model mice Methods: Retinal mRNA profiles of 13-week-old female sham control mice (SHAM), EAE model mice with MOG injection (MOG), EAE model mice with needling treatment at acupoint GB20 (GB20) and its control acupoint GV16 (GV16) were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina Hiseq platform. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed with DESeq2 R package to identify differently expressed genes with padj<0.05. Results: RNA-seq identified total 234 DEGs, with 100 genes upregulated and 134 genes downregulated, comparing MOG group with SHAM group.Further analysis revealed that, among the MOG injection induced 100 up-regulated DEGs, 24 DEGs were reversed and significantly down-regulated by GB20 treatment, while 14 were reversed and significantly down-regulated by GV16 treatment. However, 12 of the 14 reversed DEGs of GV16 treatment were already included in the 24 DEGs of GB20. The left 2 DEGs specific to GV16 treatment were Gfap (glial fibrillary acidic protein) and Fgf2 (fibroblast growth factor 2). As to the MOG injection induced 134 down-regulated DEGs, 12 DEGs were reversed and significantly up-regulated by GB20 treatment, while only 3 DEGs were reversed and significantly up-regulated by GV16 control treatment, and all the 3 DEGs were included in the 12 DEGs of GB20 treatment. Conclusions: Our research first reported that needling treatment on GB20 had regulation effects on retinal transcriptome of EAE model mice, indicating potential way of therapy for treatment of optic neuritis.

Ecel1, Oas2, Cxcl10, Tnnt2, Ppp1r1c, Oxtr, Egr4, Scn4b, Nr4a3, Isl2, Pou4f1, Gfap, Fgf2, Folh1, Sncg, Uchl1, Tppp3, Slc5a8