Identification of Key Gene Modules of Neuropathic Pain by Co-Expression Analysis

Neuropathic pain (NP) is a substantial clinical problem causing great injury to people word-widely. Although gene expression analyses had been performed previously, the mechanisms underlying the etiology and development of NP are still poorly understood. To understand the function genes involved in the etiology and development of NP, we built the co-expression modules and performed function enrichment analysis for neuropathic pain. In the present study, from a public microarray data set (GSE69901) from NCBI, gene co-expression modules were contributed with the help of WGCNA for 12 neuropathic pain samples and 13 control samples, respectively. And functional enrichment analyses were followed by DAVID database. Firstly, we established 21 co-expression modules and 19 co-expression modules out of 5,000 high-express genes in NP and control samples, respectively. Then, it showed great difference in interaction relationships of total genes and hub-genes between pairwise modules, which indicated the high confidence of gene co-expression modules. Finally, functional enrichment analysis of the top five co-expression modules in NP exhibited great differences and significant enrichment in transcription regulation of RNA polymerase II promoter and ubiquitin mediated proteolysis pathway. RNA polymerase II promoter and ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis pathway played important role in etiology and development of NP. Anyhow, our findings provided the framework of gene co-expression modules of NP and furthered the understanding of these modules from functional aspect. J. Cell. Biochem. 118: 4436-4443, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.