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Research Paper|Volume 10, Issue 9|pp 2266—2283

Comprehensive analysis of circRNA expression pattern and circRNA-miRNA-mRNA network in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis in rabbits

Feng Zhang1, Ruyou Zhang2, Xiaoyu Zhang3, Yingnan Wu1, Xiaoying Li1, Shuang Zhang1, Wenying Hou1, Yu Ding4, Jiawei Tian1, Litao Sun1, Xianchao Kong5
  • 1Department of Ultrasound, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China
  • 2Department of Neurosurgery, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China
  • 3Department of Ultrasound, Drug Rehabilitation Center of Heilongjiang Province, Harbin, 150056, China
  • 4College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China
  • 5Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China

* * Equal contribution

Received: July 5, 2018Accepted: August 25, 2018Published: September 6, 2018
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101541

Copyright: © 2018 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is a chronic and multifactorial inflammatory disease and is closely associated with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. circRNAs can act as competing endogenous RNAs to mRNAs and function in various diseases. However, there is little known about the function of circRNAs in atherosclerosis. In this study, three rabbits in the case group were fed a high-fat diet to induce atherosclerosis and another three rabbits were fed a normal diet. To explore the biological functions of circRNAs in atherosclerosis, we analyzed the circRNA, miRNA and mRNA expression profiles using RNA-seq. Many miRNAs, mRNAs and circRNAs were identified as significantly changed in atherosclerosis. We next predicted miRNA-target interactions with the miRanda tool and constructed a differentially expressed circRNA-miRNA-mRNA triple network. A gene ontology enrichment analysis showed that genes in the network were involved in cell adhesion, cell activation and the immune response. Furthermore, we generated a dysregulated circRNA-related ceRNAs network and found seven circRNAs (ocu-cirR-novel-18038, -18298, -15993, -17934, -17879, -18036 and -14389) were related to atherosclerosis. We found these circRNAs also functioned in cell adhesion, cell activation and the immune response. These results show that the crosstalk between circRNAs and their competing mRNAs might play crucial roles in the development of atherosclerosis.