Key gene co-expression modules and functional pathways involved in the pathogenesis of Graves’ disease

Publication date: Available online 31 March 2018
Source:Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology
Author(s): Xiaoqing Shao, Bin Wang, Kaida Mu, Ling Li, Qian Li, Weiwei He, Qiuming Yao, Xi Jia, Jin-an Zhang
Graves' disease (GD) is a common autoimmune thyroid disease characterized by positive thyroid stimulating hormone receptor antibody. To better understand its molecular pathogenesis, we adopted the weighted gene co-expression network analysis to reveal co-expression modules of key genes involved in the pathogenesis of GD, protein-protein interaction network analysis to identify the hub genes related to GD development and functional analyses to explore their possible functions. Our results showed that 1) a total of 2667 differentially expressed genes in our microarray study and 16 different gene co-expression modules were associated with GD, and 2) the most significant module was associated with the percentage of macrophages, T follicular helper cells and CD4⁺ memory T cells and mainly enriched in immune regulation and immune response. Overall, our study reveals several key gene co-expression modules and functional pathways involved in GD, which provides some novel insights into the pathogenesis of GD.



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