Reconstruction of the lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA network based on competitive endogenous RNA reveal functional lncRNAs in Cerebral Infarction

Functioning as miRNA sponges, long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) exert its pharmacological action via regulating expression of protein-coding genes. However, the lncRNA-mediated ceRNA in cerebral Infarction (CI) remains unclear. In this study, the expression recordsets of mRNA, lncRNA and miRNA of CI samples were obtained from the NCBI GEO datasets separately. The differentially expressed lncRNAs (DELs), miRNAs (DEMis) and mRNAs (DEMs) were identified by limma package in R platform. A total of 267 DELs, 26 DEMis, and 760 DEMs were identified as differentially expressed profiles, with which we constructed the ceRNA network composed of DELs-DEMis-DEMs. Further, clusterProfiler package in R platform is employed for performing Gene Ontology (GO) and KEGG pathway analysis. An aberrant ceRNA network was constructed according to node degrees in CI, including 28 DELs, 19 DEMs and 12 DEMis, from which we extracted the core network, in which 9 nodes were recognized as kernel genes including Tspan3, Eif4a2, rno-miR-208a-3p, rno-miR-194-5p, Pdpn, H3f3b, Stat3, Cd63 and Sdc4. Finally, with the DELs-DEMis-DEMs ceRNA network provided above, we can improve our understanding of the pathogenesis of CI mediated by lncRNA.