Since the world population is ageing, dementia is going to be a growing concern. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. The pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease is extensively studied, yet unknown remains. Therefore, we aimed to extract new knowledge from existing data. We analysed about 2700 upregulated genes and 2200 downregulated genes from three studies on the CA1 of the hippocampus of brains with Alzheimer’s disease. We found that only the calcium signalling pathway enriched by 48 downregulated genes was consistent between all three studies. We predicted miR-129 to target nine out of 48 genes. Then, we validated miR-129 to regulate six out of nine genes in HEK cells. We noticed that four out of six genes play a role in synaptic plasticity. Finally, we confirmed the upregulation of miR-129 in the hippocampus of brains of rats with scopolamine-induced amnesia as a model of Alzheimer’s disease. We suggest that future research should investigate the possible role of miR-129 in synaptic plasticity and Alzheimer’s disease. This paper presents a novel framework to gain insight into potential biomarkers and targets for diagnosis and treatment of diseases.
Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC) is the most rare and lethal form of thyroid cancer and requires effective treatment. Efforts have been made to restore sodium-iodide symporter (NIS) expression in ATC cells where it has been downregulated, yet without complete success. Systems biology approaches have been used to simplify complex biological networks. Here, we attempt to find more suitable targets in order to restore NIS expression in ATC cells. We have built a simplified protein interaction network including transcription factors and proteins involved in MAPK, TGFβ/SMAD, PI3K/AKT, and TSHR signaling pathways which regulate NIS expression, alongside proteins interacting with them. The network was analyzed, and proteins were ranked based on several centrality indices. Our results suggest that the protein interaction network of NIS expression regulation is modular, and distance-based and information-flow-based centrality indices may be better predictors of important proteins in such networks. We propose that the high-ranked proteins found in our analysis are expected to be more promising targets in attempts to restore NIS expression in ATC cells.
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