A Potential Autophagy-Related Competing Endogenous RNA Network and Corresponding Diagnostic Efficacy in Schizophrenia

Rongjie Li; Qiaoye Wang; Yufen Qiu; Youshi Meng; Lei Wei; Hao Wang; Ruikang Mo; Donghua Zou; Chunbin Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2021.628361

A Potential Autophagy-Related Competing Endogenous RNA Network and Corresponding Diagnostic Efficacy in Schizophrenia

Front Psychiatry. 2021 Feb 23:12:628361. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.628361. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Rongjie Li^{1

2}, Qiaoye Wang^{1

2}, Yufen Qiu³, Youshi Meng^{1

2}, Lei Wei^{1

2}, Hao Wang^{1

2}, Ruikang Mo^{1

2}, Donghua Zou^{1

2}, Chunbin Liu²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neurology, The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, China.
² Department of Internal Medicine, The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, China.
³ Maternal and Child Health Hospital and Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Guangxi, China.

Abstract

Competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) and autophagy were related to neurological diseases. But the relationship among ceRNA, autophagy and Schizophrenia (SZ) was not clear. In this study, we obtained gene expression profile of SZ patients (GSE38484, GSE54578, and GSE16930) from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. Then we screened the autophagy-related differentially expressed lncRNA, miRNA, and mRNA (DElncRNA, DEmiRNA, and DEmRNA) combined with Gene database from The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). In addition, we performed enrichment analysis. The result showed that biological processes (BPs) mainly were associated with cellular responses to oxygen concentration. The enriched pathways mainly included ErbB, AMPK, mTOR signaling pathway and cell cycle. Furthermore, we constructed autophagy-related ceRNA network based on the TargetScan database. Moreover, we explored the diagnostic efficiency of lncRNA, miRNA and mRNA in ceRNA, through gene set variation analysis (GSVA). The result showed that the diagnostic efficiency was robust, especially miRNA (AUC = 0.884). The miRNA included hsa-miR-423-5p, hsa-miR-4532, hsa-miR-593-3p, hsa-miR-618, hsa-miR-4723-3p, hsa-miR-4640-3p, hsa-miR-296-5p, and hsa-miR-3943. The result of this study may be helpful for deepening the pathophysiology of SZ. In addition, our finding may provide a guideline for the clinical diagnosis of SZ.

Keywords: autophagy; ceRNA; competing endogenous RNA; lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA; schizophrenia.