Identification of Hub Genes Associated With Tuberculous Pleurisy by Integrated Bioinformatics Analysis

Improving the understanding of the molecular mechanism of tuberculous pleurisy is required to develop diagnosis and new therapy strategies of targeted genes. The purpose of this study is to identify important genes related to tuberculous pleurisy. In this study, the expression profile obtained by sequencing the surgically resected pleural tissue was used to explore the differentially co-expressed genes between tuberculous pleurisy tissue and normal tissue. 29 differentially co-expressed genes were screened by weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) and differential gene expression analysis methods. According to the functional annotation analysis of R clusterProfiler software package, these genes are mainly enriched in nucleotide-sugar biosynthetic process (biological process), ficolin-1-rich granule lumen (cell component), and electron transfer activity (molecular function). In addition, in the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, 20 hub genes of DEGs and WCGNA genes were identified using the CytoHubba plug-in of Cytoscape. In the end, RPL17 was identified as a gene that can be the biomarker of tuberculous pleurisy. At the same time, there are seven genes that may have relationship with the disease (UBA7, NDUFB8, UQCRFS1, JUNB, PSMC4, PHPT1, and MAPK11).