Analysis on differential gene expression data for prediction of new biological features in permanent atrial fibrillation

PLoS One. 2013 Oct 18;8(10):e76166. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0076166. eCollection 2013.

Abstract

Permanent Atrial fibrillation (pmAF) has largely remained incurable since the existing information for explaining precise mechanisms underlying pmAF is not sufficient. Microarray analysis offers a broader and unbiased approach to identify and predict new biological features of pmAF. By considering the unbalanced sample numbers in most microarray data of case - control, we designed an asymmetric principal component analysis algorithm and applied it to re - analyze differential gene expression data of pmAF patients and control samples for predicting new biological features. Finally, we identified 51 differentially expressed genes using the proposed method, in which 42 differentially expressed genes are new findings compared with two related works on the same data and the existing studies. The enrichment analysis illustrated the reliability of identified differentially expressed genes. Moreover, we predicted three new pmAF - related signaling pathways using the identified differentially expressed genes via the KO-Based Annotation System. Our analysis and the existing studies supported that the predicted signaling pathways may promote the pmAF progression. The results above are worthy to do further experimental studies. This work provides some new insights into molecular features of pmAF. It has also the potentially important implications for improved understanding of the molecular mechanisms of pmAF.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Atrial Fibrillation / genetics*
  • Atrial Fibrillation / metabolism*
  • Gene Expression Profiling*
  • Gene Expression Regulation*
  • Gene Regulatory Networks
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological
  • Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptors / metabolism
  • Principal Component Analysis
  • Signal Transduction*

Substances

  • Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptors

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 81171411) and Key Technology Research and Development Program of Sichuan Province (Grant No. 2011FZ0034). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.