Background: Pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) is a common disease which may be a serious condition and has high mortality. Recently, it has been shown that circRNAs play an important role in the development of various diseases, including thromboembolic disease. However, circRNAs expression profiling is not clear in PTE, this study aims to identify the circRNAs expressed in PTE and to elucidate their possible role in pathophysiology of PTE.
Methods: A total of 5 patients with CTPA-confirmed PTE and 5 healthy controls were recruited for the present study. The circRNAs expression profile was analyzed by microarray.
Results: In total, 256 differentially expressed circRNAs (up 142, down114) and 1162 mRNA (up 446, down 716) were summarized by analyzing the circRNAs microarray data. The top 3 up-regulated and 3 down-regulated circRNAs were validated by Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (qRT-PCR). Two differentially expressed circRNAs (hsa_circ_0000891, hsa_circ_0043506) were selected for further analysis. Finally, we construct a circRNA-miRNA-mRNA ceRNA network with a bioinformatic prediction tool. Pathway analysis shows that the enriched mRNAs targets take part in Protein processing in endoplasmic reticulum, Systemic lupus erythematosus, Endocytosis, Spliceosome, HTLV-I infection and Ubiquitin mediated proteolysis.
Conclusion: Our findings indicated that aberrantly expressed circRNAs (hsa_circ_0000891, hsa_circ_0043506) may be involved in the development of PTE.
Keywords: circRNA, gene, pulmonary thromboembolism, circRNA-miRNA-mRNA network, functional enrichment