Identification CCL2,CXCR2,S100A9 of the immune-related gene markers and immune infiltration characteristics of inflammatory bowel disease and heart failure via bioinformatics analysis and machine learning

Abstract

Background: Recently, heart failure (HF) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have been considered to be related diseases with increasing incidence rates; both diseases are related to immunity. This study aims to analyze and identify immune-related gene (IRG) markers of HF and IBD through bioinformatics and machine learning (ML) methods and to explore their immune infiltration characteristics.

Methods: This study used gene expressiondata (GSE120895, GSE21610, GSE4183) from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database to screen differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and compare them with IRGs from the ImmPort database to obtain differentially expressed immune-related genes (DIRGs). Functional enrichment analysis of IRGs was performed using Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). Subsequently, three machine models and protein-protein interactions (PPIs) were established to identify diagnostic biomarkers. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were applied to evaluate the diagnostic value of the candidate biomarkersin the validation set (GSE1145, GSE36807) and obtain their correlations with immune cells through the Spearman algorithm. Finally, the CIBERSORT algorithm was used to evaluate the immune cell infiltration of the two diseases.

Results: Thirty-four DIRGs were screened and GO and KEGG analysis results showed that these genes are mainly related to inflammatory and immune responses. CCL2, CXCR2 and S100A9 were identified as biomarkers.The immune correlation results indicated in both diseases that CCL2 is positively correlated with mast cell activation, CXCR2 is positively correlated with neutrophils and S100A9 is positively correlated with neutrophils and mast cell activation. Analysis of immune characteristics showed that macrophages M2, macrophages M0 and neutrophils were present in both diseases.

Conclusions: CCL2, CXCR2 and S100A9 are promising biomarkers that will become potential immunogenetic biomarkers for diagnosing comorbidities of HF and IBD. macrophages M2, macrophages M0, neutrophil-mediated inflammation and immune regulation play important roles in the development of HF and IBD and may become diagnostic and therapeutic targets.

Keywords: bioinformatics; biomarkers; heart failure; inflammatory bowel; machine learning.