Screening of genes related to acute coronary syndrome and identification of functional modules in the PPI network

W.-j. Shangguan, L.-m. Tang, H. Li

Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China. lihe1972@hotmail.com

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• Cardiology

BACKGROUND: Acute coronary syndrome (ACS), referring to any group of symptoms attributed to obstruction of the coronary arteries, affects millions of patients annually and requires immediate diagnosis and therapy.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to find more biomarkers through identifying the genes which are related to ACS with samples from normal and diseased blood vessel.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: We downloaded the gene expression profile of GSE19339 from GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus) database, including 4 samples for normal and 4 for ACS. Then, the preprocessing of the data and analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were conducted with R language. WebGestalt was used to analyze the functions of the DEGs and STRING was applied to build the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. At last, we used two plugins of Cytoscape to map the functional modules on the base of the PPI network.

RESULTS: A total of 480 genes were identified as DEGs between normal and disease samples, which were most significantly related to blood vessel development. After the partition of the PPI network, we got two functional modules, and CD, CXCL, CCL and ICAM1 genes were found served as the nodes of the two modules. These genes were all related to the immune response system.

CONCLUSIONS: Our present findings suggest that CD, CXCL, CCL and IL genes may be used as biomarkers in the research of ACS and the immune response system may also play an important role in the pathogenesis of ACS. However, further experiments are still needed to confirm our result.

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