Identification of differentially expressed genes associated with ferroptosis in Crohn’s disease

Abstract

Objective:Ferroptosis-related genes may have a critical regulatory role in the pathogenetic process of Crohn’ disease(CD).The purpose of this study was to identify genes expressed in CD that are associated with ferroptosis and provide direction in the diagnosis and therapy of Crohn's disease. Methods: The data for CD mRNA expression were first gathered from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, and two gene sets were selected as major targets (GSE75214 and GSE102133) and analyzed differentially expressed genes.Next,R software (version 4.1.2) was used to analyze the common genes in CD differential expressed genes and ferroptosis-related genes.GO enrichment analysis,KEGG pathway analysis were used to identify differential related pathways and functions.Protein-protein interaction(PPI) analysis was performed to identify target genes.DSigDB website was used to predict potential target drugs for hub genes.Finally, qRT-PCR method were used to detect the expression of these ferroptosis related genes in clinical samples obtained from healthy control and CD patients. Result: According to two GEO datasets, we finally identified 13 ferroptosis DEGs(10 upregulated genes and 2 downregulated genes) in crohn disease with the threshold of p-value < 0.05 and |log2 FC| > 1 and selected for continued analysis.Go enrichment analysis and KEGG pathways results were shown in the following figures.PPI analysis indicate the mutual effect between these genes and filtered out 5 hub genes.Top 10 potential targeted drugs were selected. Finally, the result of qRT-PCR shown that the expression of three genes IL-6,PTGS2 and DUOX2 were different between CD samples and healthy samples.This result was consistent with the results we obtained in the biological information analysis. Conclusion: Bioinformatics analysis identified a total of 13 iron death-associated genes in CD. Three differential genes IL-6,PTG32 and DUOX2 were detected in tissue experiments.Our findings might provide new biomarkers and promising treatment targets in CD.