Objective: To conduct a case-control study in single, comprehensive movement disorder center in Seoul.

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the main clinical hallmarks of PD affect motor functions, including resting tremor, rigidity and loss of postural reflexes. The gold standard for diagnosing PD is to confirm the loss of dopaminergic neurons and Lewy body pathology in the substantia nigra. However, diagnosis of PD is currently based on clinical features, as there are no molecular biomarkers available yet.

Method: We compared the transcriptome and microRNA profile of PD patients’ blood samples with those of disease-free controls. Total RNA sequencing was performed to investigate differentially expressed gene profile, and small RNA sequencing was performed to differentiate microRNA profile in each group. We extract differentially expressed mRNA and miRNA between comparison samples using │fold change│2, p<0.05 and exactTest using edgeR. The negative correlation of target pair between mRNA and miRNA was detected based on miRDB v6.0 (miRbase v22). Hypergeometric test of distribution of mRNA targeted by miRNA was carried out by categorizing the targeting mRNA distribution of miRNA with negative correlation with mRNA from microarray data and the targeting mRNA distribution predicted by miRbase v22. Significant miRNAs were chosen if their p-value is less than 0.05.

Results: Total 16,660 genes (mRNA) and 522 mature miRNAs were processed from raw data of 46,427 genes and 2,656 mature miRNAs. Among them, 1869 genes of PD were differentially expressed, and 104 miRNAs of PD were differentially expressed compared to the control. The 104 miRNAs matched with at least 1 target mRNA, and 103 of them demonstrated at least 1 negative pairs with mRNA. Hypergeometric test confirmed the negative correlation between 24 miRNAs and their target mRNAs.

Conclusion: Our data suggests that analysis of mRNA-miRNA correlation can pinpoint the biomarker target in de novo PD patient although this is the preliminary data from 1 PD patient and 1 control to date. We are currently recruiting more candidates, and the RNA sequencings are in progress with the expectation of collecting more precise data in near future. (This study was supported by KNA-21-Neuro-Frontier-Fellowship Award and Research Fund of Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Korea.)

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/transcriptome-microrna-correlation-and-the-regulation-of-targeted-gene-expression-in-de-novo-parkinsons-disease-patients/