Altered immune pathways in patients of temporal lobe epilepsy with and without hippocampal sclerosis

Abstract Over the past decades, the immune responses have been suspected of participating in the mechanisms for epilepsy. To assess the immune related pathway in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), we explored the altered immune pathways in TLE patients with and without hippocampal sclerosis (HS). We analyzed RNA-seq data from 3 TLE-HS and 3 TLE-nonHS patients, including identification of differentially expressed RNA, function pathway enrichment, the protein–protein interaction network and construction of ceRNA regulatory network. We illustrated the immune related landscape of molecules and pathways on human TLE-HS. Also, we identified several differential immune related genes like HSP90AA1 and SOD1 in TLE-HS patients. Further ceRNA regulatory network analysis found SOX2-OT connected to miR-671-5p and upregulated the target gene SPP1 in TLE-HS patients. Also, we identified both SOX2-OT and SPP1 were significantly upregulated in five different databases including TLE-HS patients and animal models. Our findings established the first immune related genes and possible regulatory pathways in TLE-HS patients and animal models, which provided a novel insight into disease pathogenesis in both patients and animal models. The immune related SOX2-OT/miR-671-5p/SPP1 axis may be the potential therapeutic target for TLE-HS.