Identification of Potential Targets Linked to the Cardiovascular/Alzheimer’s Axis through Bioinformatics Approaches
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Andújar Vera, Francisco Luis; García Fontana, Cristina; Sanabria de la Torre, Raquel; González Salvatierra, Sheila; Martínez Heredia, Luis; Iglesias Baena, Iván; Muñoz Torres, Manuel Eduardo; García Fontana, BeatrizEditorial
MDPI
Materia
Alzheimer's disease Bioinformatics Cardiovascular disease Differentially expressed genes Hubs Protein-protein interaction networks
Date
2022-02-06Referencia bibliográfica
Andújar-Vera, F... [et al.]. Identification of Potential Targets Linked to the Cardiovascular/Alzheimer’s Axis through Bioinformatics Approaches. Biomedicines 2022, 10, 389. [https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines10020389]
Sponsorship
Instituto de Salud Carlos III grant (PI18-00803) European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) Junta de Andalucía grant (PI-0268- 2019); Instituto de Salud Carlos III FEDER (CD20/00022 and FI19/00118 respectively); University of Granada FEDER 8110Abstract
The identification of common targets in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) in recent years makes the study of the CVD/AD axis a research topic of great interest. Besides aging, other links between CVD and AD have been described, suggesting the existence of common molecular mechanisms. Our study aimed to identify common targets in the CVD/AD axis. For this purpose, genomic data from calcified and healthy femoral artery samples were used to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs), which were used to generate a protein-protein interaction network, where a module related to AD was identified. This module was enriched with the functionally closest proteins and analyzed using different centrality algorithms to determine the main targets in the CVD/AD axis. Validation was performed by proteomic and data mining analyses. The proteins identified with an important role in both pathologies were apolipoprotein E and haptoglobin as DEGs, with a fold change about +2 and -2, in calcified femoral artery vs healthy artery, respectively, and clusterin and alpha-2-macroglobulin as close interactors that matched in our proteomic analysis. However, further studies are needed to elucidate the specific role of these proteins, and to evaluate its function as biomarkers or therapeutic targets.