Identification of Potential Targets Linked to the Cardiovascular/Alzheimer’s Axis through Bioinformatics Approaches 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, Beatriz Alzheimer's disease Bioinformatics Cardiovascular disease Differentially expressed genes Hubs Protein-protein interaction networks This research was funded by Instituto de Salud Carlos III grant (PI18-00803), co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and by Junta de Andalucía grant (PI-0268- 2019). In addition, C.G.-F. and S.G.-S. are funded by postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships from Instituto de Salud Carlos III with co-funding by FEDER (CD20/00022 and FI19/00118 respectively). R.S.d.l.T. was funded by the University of Granada with co-funding by FEDER, by grant number 8110 (Research investigator call in the framework of the youth guarantee Program) 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. 2022-03-18T09:42:07Z 2022-03-18T09:42:07Z 2022-02-06 info:eu-repo/semantics/article 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] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/73543 10.3390/biomedicines10020389 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España MDPI