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Identifying Novel Aging-Related Biomarkers for Age-related Macular Degeneration with Integrative Bioinformatics Approaches
- 1 Chongqing DEPU Foreign Language School, Chongqing, China
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of visual impairment in older adults worldwide and is a condition that causes visual deprivation. There exist two subcategories of this disease with the wet form of this disease being the focus of our study. Using bioinformatic analysis, this research conducted investigations to uncover the genes related to aging that may be biomarkers for the development of AMD. First, we compared the expression levels of samples from AMD/CNV patients and a control group using the GEO microarrays (GSE29801) in order to obtain differentially expressed genes (DEGs). WGCNA, combined with functional enrichment analysis, is utilized to discover and validate the gene module crucial for AMD. Differentially expressed aging-related genes (DEARGs) were identified by overlapping significant gene sets. The subcellular location of hub DEARGs and their corresponding cell subpopulations were determined and predicted using the Geo dataset GSE155288. Pan-cancer analyses were used to confirm those hub DEARGs’ function in other diseases. Moreover, both Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) and AlphaFold prediction were employed to validate the protein interaction among the key DEARGs. Lastly, a potential target drug was selected, with portions of them validated through drug-protein interactions. In further analysis of our result, the collect gene set of 7 DEARGs was divided into the immune-related group and the non-immune-related group. These groups uncovered two distinct pathways of AMD development, with one triggering inflammatory responses by promoting macrophage proliferation and the other inducing choroidal neovascularization formation due to malfunctioning growth regulator genes
Keywords
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), Age-related gene, transcriptomics
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Cite this article
Zhao,L. (2025). Identifying Novel Aging-Related Biomarkers for Age-related Macular Degeneration with Integrative Bioinformatics Approaches. Theoretical and Natural Science,90,1-23.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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