MiR-96-5p relieves neuropathic pain by targeting ZEB1

Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) gradually attracts researchers’ attention in regulating the development of neuropathic pain, and many miRNAs have been reported that were able to alleviate neuropathic pain. Meantime, neuroinflammations promote the process of neuropathic pain. MiR‐96‐5p was associated with many pathological diseases, including many kinds of cancers. However, we knew little about the biological function of miR‐96‐5p in the regulation of neuropathic pain development. Hence, we focused our study on the biological function of miR‐96‐5p in neuropathic pain.ResultsAs the result, a decrease of miR‐96‐5p expression was observed in CCI rats model. Meanwhile, the overexpression of miR-96-5p resulted in inhibition of inflammation‐correlated biomarkers of IL‐6, IL‐1β and Cox-2. In addition, we predicted the zinc finger E‐box binding homeobox 1 (ZEB1) was one target of miR‐96‐5p, with a conserved interaction site at 3′‐untranslated region of ZEB1. Furthermore, we observed the increased expression of ZEB1 in CCI rats at both of transcriptional and translational level and miR‐96‐5p could regulate that negatively. And overexpressing ZEB1 would disrupt the miR-96-5p inducing alleviation of neuropathic pain, along with IL‐6, IL‐1β and Cox-2 up-regulated. ConclusionsOur study demonstrated that miR‐96‐5p could relieve neuropathic pain by targeting ZEB1 in vivo.