A systems biology approach towards the identification of candidate therapeutic genes and potential biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2019
Abstract
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is an irreversible and incurable multigenic neurodegenerative disorder. It involves progressive loss of mid brain dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SN). We compared brain gene expression profiles with those from the peripheral blood cells of a separate sample of PD patients to identify disease-associated genes. Here, we demonstrate the use of gene expression profiling of brain and blood for detecting valid targets and identifying early PD biomarkers. Implementing this systematic approach, we discovered putative PD risk genes in brain, delineated biological processes and molecular functions that may be particularly disrupted in PD and also identified several putative PD biomarkers in blood. 20 of the differentially expressed genes in SN were also found to be differentially expressed in the blood. Further application of this methodology to other brain regions and neurological disorders should facilitate the discovery of highly reliable and reproducible candidate risk genes and biomarkers for PD. The identification of valid peripheral biomarkers for PD may ultimately facilitate early identification, intervention, and prevention efforts as well. © 2019 Sakharkar et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords
blood analysis, blood sampling, brain region, brain tissue, clinical article, controlled study, disease association, disease control, down regulation, gene expression profiling, gene expression regulation, gene identification, gene interaction, gene ontology, gene targeting, genetic association, genetic risk, genetic transcription, human, human tissue, molecular dynamics, neurobiology, neurologic disease, Parkinson disease, protein expression, signal transduction, substantia nigra pars compacta, upregulation
Divisions
InstituteofBiologicalSciences
Publication Title
PLoS ONE
Volume
14
Issue
9
Publisher
Public Library of Science