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Identification of transcription regulatory relationships in rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis

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Abstract

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is recognized as the most crippling or disabling type of arthritis, and osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of arthritis. These diseases severely reduce the quality of life, and cause high socioeconomic burdens. However, the molecular mechanisms of RA and OA development remain elusive despite intensive research efforts. In this study, we aimed to identify the potential transcription regulatory relationships between transcription factors (TFs) and differentially co-expressed genes (DCGs) in RA and OA, respectively. We downloaded the gene expression profiles of RA and OA from the Gene Expression Omnibus and analyzed the gene expression using computational methods. We identified a set of 4,076 DCGs in pairwise comparisons between RA and OA patients, RA and normal donors (NDs), or OA and ND. After regulatory network construction and regulatory impact factor analysis, we found that EGR1, NFE2L1, and NFYA were crucial TFs in the regulatory network of RA and NFYA, CBFB, CREB1, YY1 and PATZ1 were crucial TFs in the regulatory network of OA. These TFs could regulate the DCGs expression to involve RA and OA by promoting or inhibiting their expression. Altogether, our work may extend our understanding of disease mechanisms and may lead to an improved diagnosis. However, further experiments are still needed to confirm these observations.

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Acknowledgments

The project was supported by the foundation of Pudong District (PW2011B-2 and PWRq2012-13).

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All authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Traumatology, East Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine, Number 150 Jimo Road, Pudong New District, Shanghai, 200120, China

    Guofeng Li, Ning Han, Zengchun Li & Qingyou Lu

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  1. Guofeng Li
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  2. Ning Han
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  3. Zengchun Li
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Correspondence to Zengchun Li.

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G. Li and N. Han should be regarded as co-first authors.

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Li, G., Han, N., Li, Z. et al. Identification of transcription regulatory relationships in rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. Clin Rheumatol 32, 609–615 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10067-012-2143-9

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