Integrated analysis of lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA ceRNA network in neurodegenerative diseases

Background

Neurodegenerative diseases are one of the main causes of physical or behavioral complications which is considered as one of the main health concerns of the elderly population. However, treatment options for neurological diseases are still limited. Recent advances in bioinformatics studies provide an opportunity to understand the mechanisms of these diseases to identify therapeutic targets. In this research, the mRNAs involved in Alzheimer's, Multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, and Huntington's neurological diseases, which are regulated by upstream factors, have been investigated. Only 2% of all transcripts of a gene are translated into protein and the rest are converted into miRNAs, lncRNAs or circRNAs. miRNAs have crucial role in regulating mRNAs and in a similar sequence lncRNAs or circRNAs are crucial in regulating miRNAs, which disrupts gene expression.

Results

To discover above relations in neurodegenerative disease, miRNA-mRNA and lncRNA-miRNA bipartite networks were constructed and then were integrated to construct lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA tripartite networks. Constructing these networks leads to understand deeply about the structure of this mechanism and introducing new biomarkers for the studied diseases. In the next step, enrichment analysis was performed to recognize the genes involved in crucial pathways. Finally, the obtained biomarkers were investigated over the previous studies to prove the accuracy of proposed method.

Conclusions

In conclusion, for all four diseases, several numbers of mRNAs, miRNAs and lncRNAs were identified, which are introduced as biomarkers extracted by this study.