Protein-protein interaction network analysis of children atopic asthma

Yan Liu, Sheng Liu*

Department of Pediatrics, First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, PR China

*Department of Pharmacology, Basic Medical College of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Luoyang, PR China

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• Genetics

BACKGROUND: Asthma prevalence has increased very considerably in recent decades such that it is now one of the commonest chronic disorders in the world. In this present study, We constructed a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network by mapped the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) to the PPI data and performed Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis of the PPI network. We aimed to explore the pathogenesis of atopic asthma by bioinformatics methods.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: To explore the pathogenesis of atopic asthma by bioinformatics methods, we obtained the global gene expression profile of pediatric asthmatic epithelium GSE18965 from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), and identified the differentially expressed genes between healthy nonatopic samples and atopic asthmatic samples.

RESULTS: Total 12 DEGs were selected. Furthermore, we constructed a protein-protein interaction network by mapped the DEGs to the PPI data and performed Gene Ontology enrichment analysis of the PPI network. Total 15 GO terms were enriched and the enriched terms can be generally classified into two groups: cell cycle and immunity.

CONCLUSIONS: Our results confirmed the role of cell proliferation and immune system in the pathogenesis of atopic asthma. Besides, our PPI network is useful in investigating the complex interacting mechanisms of transcription factors and their regulated genes in atopic asthma.

Corresponding Author: Yan Liu, MD; e-mail: liuyanssdd@hotmail.com