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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 3|pp 4634—4646

Identification of microRNA-16-5p and microRNA-21-5p in feces as potential noninvasive biomarkers for inflammatory bowel disease

Rui Zhou1,2, Peishan Qiu1,2, Haizhou Wang1,2, Huijie Yang1,2, Xueying Yang3, Mingliang Ye1,2, Fan Wang1,2, Qiu Zhao1,2
  • 1Department of Gastroenterology, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, China
  • 2Hubei Clinical Center and Key Laboratory of Intestinal and Colorectal Diseases, Wuhan 430071, China
  • 3Department of Medical Records, The Central Hospital of Enshi Autonomous Prefecture, Enshi 445000, China
* Equal contribution
Received: July 13, 2020Accepted: December 10, 2020Published: February 1, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202428

Copyright: © 2021 Zhou 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

Background: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic idiopathic gastrointestinal disease. Increasing evidence suggests that microRNAs (miRNAs) may participate in the pathophysiology of IBD.

Methods: A miRCURY™ LNA Array and in situ hybridization were employed to screen for differentially expressed miRNAs (DEMs) in fecal specimens from 41 IBD patients (22 ulcerative colitis (UC), 19 Crohn’s disease (CD)) and 23 healthy controls (HC). RT-qPCR was performed to confirm the findings. The DEMs target genes and corresponding biological functions were predicted by bioinformatics analysis.

Results: Compared with HC, miR-16-5p in the feces was up-regulated both in UC and CD patients (p < 0.01), while miR-21-5p was up-regulated only in UC patients (p < 0.01). TargetScan 7.2, miRWalk, and miRDB were used to predict 216 public target genes of miR-16-5p and miR-21-5p, and six hub genes (PIK3R1, GRB2, SUZ12, NTRK2, Smurf2, and WWP1) were analyzed using the STRING database and Cytoscape. All the hub genes promote the occurrence and development of IBD-related colorectal cancer.

Conclusions: The elevated levels of miR-16-5p and miR-21-5p in feces of IBD patients have to guide significance for the noninvasive clinical diagnosis of IBD and have a warning effect on the occurrence of IBD-related colorectal cancer.