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Identification of potential predictive biomarkers and biological pathways and the correction with immune infiltration in the activation of Crohn’s disease

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Abstract

Crohn’s disease (CD), a subtype of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), has increasing prevalence in the world. Due to the lack of cure strategy, most patients with CD develop progressive disease companying with a series of serious complications. Therefore, exploring molecular mechanism differences between active and inactive CD will help in the screening of predict markers and therapeutic targets. In this study, we analyzed differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and molecular pathways through between active and inactive CD patients. In addition, the abundance of 22 immune cell types were assessed by using the CIBERSORT. The hub DEGs were screened out by the CytoHubba in Cytoscape, followed by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression. Finally, the clinical predictive model was constructed by binary logistic regression model. The diagnostic efficacy was tested by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and verified in independent datasets. The results showed that there were 137 DEGs between the active and inactive CD. Most of them were involved in regulating the immunity process. In addition, the decreased abundance of CD8 T cells and the increased abundance of M0, M1 macrophages, and neutrophils were closely related to CD activation. CXCL9, C3AR1, IL1B, and TLR4 were the hub gene and can be applied to the prediction of CD activation. Our results provided important targets for the prediction of CD activation and the selection of therapeutic targets.

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Data availability

The data can be downloaded from GEO dataset (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/).

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciated the data provided by GEO database.

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Author notes

  1. Wei-Ming Zhong and Xiao-Hang Qian contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of General Practice, Wuxi Huishan District People’s Hospital, Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China

    Wei-Ming Zhong

  2. Department of Neurology and Institute of Neurology, Rui Jin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China

    Xiao-Hang Qian

  3. Department of Anatomy, Wuxi School of Medicine, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China

    Zhe-Wu Jin

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  1. Wei-Ming Zhong
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Contributions

Zhong WM and Jin ZW designed and guided the study and provided comments for the study. Zhong WM and Qian XH developed the methodology and analyzed the data. All of the authors discussed the results and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhe-Wu Jin.

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Zhong, WM., Qian, XH. & Jin, ZW. Identification of potential predictive biomarkers and biological pathways and the correction with immune infiltration in the activation of Crohn’s disease. Immunogenetics 74, 527–537 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00251-022-01274-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00251-022-01274-5

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