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Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small ~22-nt regulatory RNAs that can silence target genes, by blocking their protein production or degrading the mRNAs. Pig is an important animal in the agriculture industry because of its utility in the meat production. Besides, pig has tremendous biomedical importance as a model organism because of its closer proximity to humans than the mouse model. Several hundreds of miRNAs have been identified from mammals, humans, mice and rats, but little is known about the miRNA component in the pig genome. Here, we adopted an experimental approach to identify conserved and unique miRNAs and characterize their expression patterns in diverse tissues of pig.

Nuclear factor (NF)-cB is a transcription factor regulating the expression of inflammatory and immune genes. In the present study, an extract from stem bark of Cinnamomum cassia Blume(Lauraceae) was discovered to have an inhibitory effect on LPS-induced NF-KB transcriptional activity, which was determined using macrophages RAW 264.7 transfected stably with an alkaline phosphatase reporter construct containing four copies of the NF-KB binding KB sequence. Following activity-guided fractionation, trans-cinnamaldehyde and 2-methoxycinnamaldehyde were identified as the NF-KB inhibitors from C cassia with IC50 values of 43 MM and 31 pM, respectively. As a positive control, caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE) showed an IC50 value of 2 uM on NF-KB transcriptional activity. Both trans-cinnamaldehyde and 2-methoxycinnamaldehyde inhibited LPS-induced DNA binding activity of NF-KB in addition to NF-KB transcription-al activity.