Expression Profiles of Long Non-coding RNA and Messenger RNA in Human Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and messenger RNAs (mRNAs) play an important role in central nervous diseases; however, the exact expression and co-expressed profiles in human traumatic brain injury (TBI) are still unknown. Therefore, we investigated whole blood in 12 patients with TBI and 4 healthy controls to observe expression characteristics with different severity. We identified 3,035 lncRNAs and 1,204 mRNAs differentially expressed in the severe TBI group, 2,362 lncRNAs and 656 mRNAs in the moderate group, and 433 lncRNAs and 100 mRNAs in the mild group. Enrichment analyses showed 30 signaling pathways such as inflammatory and immune response pathways. Subsequently, a lncRNA-gene co-expression network was generated for 717 lncRNA-mRNA pairs and most of them with a positive correlation. Based on GSEA analysis, we found that TBI caused severe immune abnormality reflected on Th1, Th2, and Th17 cell differentiation deficiency. Finally, the expression of one upregulated and one downregulated lncRNA was validated in all three TBI groups, which was consistent with the microarray results. In summary, our results show that expression profiles of lncRNAs and mRNAs are significantly different in bloods from different severity TBI especially in immune response, providing novel insight for lncRNAs in human TBI.

Discoveries for Long Non-Coding RNA Dynamics in Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Moreover, 2.5% of patients with moderate to severe TBI were predicted to have an onset of acute ischemic stroke [ 34 ]. Recently, the lncRNA profiles in TBI were investigated in the mouse cortex [ 35 ] and in whole blood samples derived from TBI patients, leading to the identification of 10 significantly altered expressed lncRNAs [ 36 ]. Meanwhile, following TBI injury, various regulatory lncRNAs, such as metastasis-associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1 ( MALAT1 ), could be used as an approach or delaying secondary injury progression.…”

Research Progress on the Inflammatory Effects of Long Non-coding RNA in Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Generally, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are non-coding RNA (ncRNA) transcripts greater than 200 nucleotides (nt) in length. These non-coding sequences were identified in the 1970s ( Iyer et al, 2015 ; Ren et al, 2020 ). At present, the general understanding of evolutionary biology states that lncRNAs have no biological function and are, therefore, “junk DNA” ( Chen et al, 2019 ).…”

The Involvement of Long Non-coding RNA and Messenger RNA Based Molecular Networks and Pathways in the Subacute Phase of Traumatic Brain Injury in Adult Mice

“…lncRNAs are also involved in various pathophysiological mechanisms of central nervous system (CNS) diseases, and targeting these lncRNAs can treat most CNS diseases (Ang et al, 2020;Kahaei et al, 2020;Tian et al, 2020), such as Alzheimer's disease (Zhang et al, 2018), and ischemic stroke (Zhang et al, 2021). Furthermore, lncRNAs have specific expression profiles in brain tissue and can be used as potential independent prognostic molecular markers (Kadakkuzha et al, 2015;Ren et al, 2020). Several recent studies demonstrated the importance of lncRNAs in TBI.…”

“…Yang et al (2019) observed expression characteristics of lncRNAs and mRNAs in human TBI tissues in the acute stage. Ren et al (2020) investigated the expression profiles of lncRNAs and mRNAs in blood from TBI patients. Abundant evidence suggests that various lncRNAs are aberrantly expressed in mouse TBI tissues and can improve TBI by inhibiting the inflammatory response of microglia in the acute phase (Wang et al, 2017;Zhong et al, 2017;Patel et al, 2018).…”