Background
Whether blunt trauma patient will get venous thromboembolism (VTE) is still a huge challenge to forecast. The objective of our study is to investigate and identify the potential biomarker genes for blunt trauma patients with VTE based on the method of bioinformatics analysis.
Methods
To investigate differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of blunt trauma and VTE, firstly we used the data obtained from the gene expression omnibus (GEO) database, and DEGs were respectively obtained via LIMMA. Next Weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) was used to investigate the co-expression network of blunt trauma DEGs and two modules were found. We chose the most significant module as the key one in correlation with blunt trauma. We got intersection of DEGs in blunt trauma and VTE, which were analyzed using Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways. Then we used STRING to create a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, and hub genes were screened by Cytoscape software and analyzed of functional enrichment. We chose another GEO database to evaluate the value of hub genes, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were done at last.
Results
There are a total of 546 DEGs of VTE and 4266 DEGs of blunt trauma were screened out from GSE19151 and GSE36809 respectively. Then 1568 DEGs of blunt trauma were identified in the most significant module. And 101 intersections of DEGs were found to be enriched for various functions and pathways. Among these DEGs, 6 overlapped hub genes with high degrees of stress method were selected. These hub genes include MRPL3, RPLP0, MRPL15, TP53, MYC, CD3D.And the six hub genes were tested to have high diagnostic values.