Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 5|pp 4204—4221

Comprehensive characterization of endometrial competing endogenous RNA network in infertile women of childbearing age

Meihua Zhang¹, Junxia Li², Shuyin Duan^1,³, Zhenya Fang¹, Jiaqi Tian², Haoyu Yin², Qingfeng Zhai², Xietong Wang^1,⁴, Lin Zhang^1,²

¹Key Laboratory of Birth Regulation and Control Technology of National Health and Family Planning Commission of China, Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital of Shandong Province, Shandong University, Jinan 250001, China
²School of Public Health and Management, Weifang Medical University, Weifang 261042, China
³School of Public Health, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, China
⁴Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shandong Provincial Hospital, Jinan 250001, China

* Equal contribution

Received: December 27, 2019Accepted: February 20, 2020Published: February 29, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102874

Copyright © 2020 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

Endometriosis is widely associated with infertility in women of childbearing age, for which there have been no effective treatments. Recent studies suggest that the dysregulation of RNAs contributes to the pathogenesis of endometriosis, so we conduct the case-control genetic analysis to characterize the expression and interaction of different subtypes of RNAs in infertile women with endometriosis. The ectopic and eutopic endometrium of patients undergoing infertility treatment were collected and subjected to high throughput sequencing, and bioinformatics analysis was conducted to construct the competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network. As a result, the RNA interactive network was constructed in endometriosis, and a set of mRNAs such as cyclin-dependent kinase 1 (CDK1) and proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) along with their corresponding miRNAs and lncRNAs were found to promote the growth and death of endometrial stromal cells, which was essential for the pathogenesis of endometriosis. These data suggest that RNA crosstalk is a crucial segment in the development of endometriosis, where CDK1 and PCNA may serve as emerging targets for the treatment of endometriosis-related infertility in women of childbearing age.