Low Levels of MicroRNA-10a in Cardiovascular Endothelium and Blood Serum Are Related to Human Atherosclerotic Disease

Jong-Tar Kuo; Hsiao-En Tsai; Ching-Ting Lin; Chih-I Lee; Pei-Ling Lee; Yu-Rong Ruan; Jeng-Jiann Chiu; Ding-Yu Lee

doi:10.1155/2021/1452917

Low Levels of MicroRNA-10a in Cardiovascular Endothelium and Blood Serum Are Related to Human Atherosclerotic Disease

Cardiol Res Pract. 2021 Jul 15:2021:1452917. doi: 10.1155/2021/1452917. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Jong-Tar Kuo^#¹, Hsiao-En Tsai^#^{2

3}, Ching-Ting Lin^#⁴, Chih-I Lee⁵, Pei-Ling Lee⁵, Yu-Rong Ruan¹, Jeng-Jiann Chiu⁵, Ding-Yu Lee¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biological Science and Technology, China University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan.
² Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, National Taiwan University Hsin-Chu Hospital, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
³ Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine, National Taiwan University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan.
⁴ School of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan.
⁵ Institute of Cellular and System Medicine, National Health Research Institutes, Miaoli, Taiwan.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Background: MicroRNA-10a (miR-10a) inhibits transcriptional factor GATA6 to repress inflammatory GATA6/VCAM-1 signaling, which is regulated by blood flow to affect endothelial function/dysfunction. This study aimed to identify the expression patterns of miR-10a/GATA6/VCAM-1 in vivo and study their implications in the pathophysiology of human coronary artery disease (CAD), i.e., atherosclerosis.

Methods: Human atherosclerotic coronary arteries and nondiseased arteries were used to detect the expressions of miR-10a/GATA6/VCAM-1 in pathogenic vs. normal conditions. In addition, sera from CAD patients and healthy subjects were collected to detect the level of circulating miR-10a.

Results: The comparison of human atherosclerotic coronary arteries with nondiseased arteries demonstrated that lower levels of endothelial miR-10a are related to human atherogenesis. Moreover, GATA6/VCAM-1 (a downstream target of miR-10a) was highly expressed in the endothelium, accompanied by the reduced levels of miR-10a during the development of human atherosclerosis. In addition, CAD patients had a significantly lower concentration of miR-10a in their serum compared to healthy subjects.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that low miR-10a and high GATA6/VCAM-1 in the cardiovascular endothelium correlates to the development of human atherosclerotic lesions, suggesting that miR-10a signaling has the potential to be developed as a biomarker for human atherosclerosis.