microRNA and mRNA expression profiling analysis of dichlorvos cytotoxicity in porcine kidney epithelial PK15 cells.

Dichlorvos (DIC) is an organophosphate compound with cholinergic and noncholinergic neurotoxicity as well as non-neuronal cytotoxicity. Little is known about the mechanisms of DIC cytotoxicity in non-neuronal cells. In this study, we established a porcine kidney epithelial cell line (PK15) as a model to explore the mechanisms underlying DIC cytotoxicity based on miRNA and mRNA expression profiling analysis. We found that DIC inhibited the proliferation of PK15 cells in a dose- and time-dependent manner, which may result from apoptosis induced by DIC. Microarray analyses revealed that 16 and 14 miRNAs were significantly upregulated and downregulated in PK15 cells treated by 0.875 mM DIC for 8 h. Among the 30 differentially expressed miRNAs, 7 new miRNAs in pigs were predicted by homology-based searches. In addition, DIC upregulated 339 and downregulated 282 mRNA transcripts. A target prediction algorithm was used to analyze the pattern of differentially expressed miRNAs and mRNAs. Functional analysis indicated that these mRNAs belonged to different functional categories, forming a network participating in the DIC-induced apoptosis in PK15 cells. Therefore, our findings provide new insights into the role of miRNAs in the gene expression and function in DIC-related noncholinergic cytotoxicity.