PPBP as a marker of diabetic nephropathy podocyte injury via Bioinformatics Analysis

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is a type of kidney injuries associated with diabetes mellitus and the prevalence of DN has increased dramatically. However, DN still pose problems in therapy, and prognosis. Identifying new DN biomarkers would be helpful in reducing morbidity and mortality from DN and developing novel preventive approaches. In the study, from GSE36336 dataset with DN glomeruli samples, we screened for 238 differentially expressed genes. Enrichment analysis were performed to find out biological function and diseases of DEGs. Next, depended on protein-protein interaction network, We identified top 10 hub genes (Serpine1, Cxcl10, Cfd, Ppbp, Retn, Socs2, Ccr5, Mmp8, Pf4, Cxcl9) may played potential roles in DN. Meanwhile, transcriptome sequencing on podocyte were performed to reconfirm the reliability of Ppbp. To verify the efficiency of the selected genes as biomarkers, several experiments like qRT-PCR, renal histologic analysis and immunofluorescence were conducted to validate. Our results showed that PPBP have the potential to become a novel biomarker for DN podocyte injury.