"Three miRNAs were altered in response to the lower nicotine concentration (20uM). Of them, miR-80 and miR-79 were upregulated by 1.0 (P=0.045) and 0.9 (P=0.022) fold, respectively. Conversely, miR-230 was inhibited by 0.5 fold (P=0.019). On the other hand, the expression of 38 miRNAs changed with statistical significance in worms treated with high nicotine concentration (20 mM). The fold changes and P-values are shown in Table 1. About 78% of the altered miRNAs were upregulated with fold changes ranging from 0.5 to 3.4 fold. The most upregulated miRNAs were miR-2220 with 3.4-fold change (P=0.034) followed by
mir-90 (P=0.045) and mir- 2210 (P=0.03) with >1.5 folds change. Other miRNAs, such as
mir-47 (P=0.027),
mir-2216 (P=0.034),
mir-49 (P=0.019),
mir-38 (P=0.004),
mir-255 (P=0.003),
mir-1829 (P=0.037),
mir-785 (P=0.003), and
mir-241 (P=0.017), were upregulated by at least 100%. The remaining 22% miRNAs that were affected by the 20mM nicotine treatment were downregulated by at least 50%. The most downregulated miRNAs were
mir-58 (P=0.014) followed by
mir-1821 (P=0.03) and
lin-4 (P=0.002) (Table 1). In addition, miR-80 was the only miRNA upregulated in both low and high concentration nicotine treatments (Fig. 2)."