Transcriptomic and experimental analysis uncovers five palmitoylation-related biomarkers in atherosclerosis, highlighting potential diagnostic utility and protective causal pathways.
Key Points
Identify key palmitoylation-related transcriptomic biomarkers, evaluate their potential causal links to atherosclerosis, and assess their diagnostic and biological relevance.
Analyzed microarray data from training (GSE100927) and validation (GSE43292) cohorts using differential expression analysis, two-sample Mendelian randomization, and machine-learning feature selection (random forest and SVM-RFE).
Characterized single-cell expression profiles and cell-cell communication using dataset GSE159677.
Evaluated aortic mRNA and protein expression in an in vivo atherosclerosis model of ApoE-deficient mice fed a high-fat diet using RT-qPCR and western blotting.
Identified 51 palmitoylation-related differentially expressed genes and prioritized five core biomarkers: PLCB2, GMIP, NEXN, PLN, and SLC7A7.
Two-sample Mendelian randomization demonstrated a significant potential protective causal association between SLC7A7 expression and atherosclerosis.
ApoE-deficient mice fed a high-fat diet exhibited significant upregulation of PLCB2, GMIP, and SLC7A7 alongside downregulation of NEXN and PLN at both transcript and protein levels.