Fig. 4

High through-put RNA sequencing showing p53 the main target of muscone. (A) RNA-seq was used to detect the differential expressed genes of muscone treatment degenerated NP cells in IL-1β environment, the heatmap of unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis showing the differentially expressed genes in muscone treated dataset. Each row represents the relative expres-sion level of each gene in different samples. The MA plot (B) and the volcano plot (C) showing the significantly differentially expressed genes between muscone treatment and non-treated degener-ated NP cells induced by IL-1β. (D) The KEGG pathway enrichment analysis showing the most abundant GO terms in the muscone treated NP cell dataset, note that the p53 signaling pathway is significantly enriched (red bars, FDR < 0.05, P < 0.05). qPCR analysis showing the relative mRNA expression levels of the candidate muscone target gene (E) or related pathway gene (F). The qPCR experiments were repeated 3 times, and GAPDH is used as an internal control. Data are shown as mean ± SD. *, P < 0.05; **, P < 0.01.