Identification of VCAN as Hub Gene for Diabetic Kidney Disease Immune Injury Using Integrated Bioinformatics Analysis

作者：Qiannan Xu, Binjue Li, Yucheng Wang, Cuili Wang, Shi Feng, Xue Lü, Jianghua Chen, Hong Jiang · 发表于：Frontiers in Physiology · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.3389/fphys.2021.651690 · 被引用次数：18 · 研究领域：Chronic Kidney Disease and Diabetes、Advanced Glycation End Products research、Renal Diseases and Glomerulopathies

Background: Diabetic kidney disease (DKD) is a leading cause of chronic kidney disease in China. Tubular injury contributes to the progression of DKD. Our study was conducted to explore the differential gene expression profiles between kidneys from patients with DKD and kidney living donors (LDs). Methods: In total, seven DKD and eighteen LD gene expression profiles from the GSE104954 dataset were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus database. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were analyzed in R with the limma package. DEGs were uploaded to the g:Profiler online database to explore the Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways. Ingenuity pathway analysis (IPA) was carried out using online IPA software. Weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) was performed using the WGCNA R package. By integrating DEGs and genes from the top 1 phenotype-gene associated module, we determined the hub gene. We next tested the hub gene, VCAN, in the GSE30122 dataset. We also validated the versican levels in human kidney tissues, explored immune cell type enrichment using an online database xCell, and investigated the correlation between cell types and VCAN expression. Results: A total of 563 DEGs was identified. A large number of pathways were involved in the immune response process according to the results of GO, KEGG, and IPA. Using WGCNA, we selected the lightcyan module in which genes showed the strongest correlation with the phenoty...