Background and Objective: Periodontitis is a multifactorial chronic inflammatory disease that can lead to the irreversible destruction of dental support tissues. As an epigenetic factor, the expression of circRNA is tissue-dependent and disease-dependent.This study aimed to identify novel periodontitis-associated circRNAs and predict relevant circRNA-periodontitis regulatory network by using recently developed bioinformatic tools and integrating sequencing profiling with clinical information for getting a better and more thorough image of periodontitis pathogenesis, from gene to clinic.Material and Methods: High-throughput sequencing and RT-qPCR were conducted to identify differentially expressed circRNAs in gingival tissues from periodontitis patients. The relationship between upregulated circRNAs expression and probing depth (PD) was performed using Spearman's correlation analysis. Bioinformatic analyses including GO analysis, circRNA-disease association prediction, and circRNA-miRNA-mRNA network prediction were performed to clarify potential regulatory functions of identified circRNAs in periodontitis. A receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve was established to assess the diagnostic significance of identified circRNAs.
Results: High-throughput sequencing identified 70 differentially expressed circRNAs (68 upregulated and 2 downregulated circRNAs) in human periodontitis (fold change >2.0 and p < .05). The top five upregulated circRNAs were validated by RT-qPCR that This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.