Expression characteristics of long noncoding RNA and messenger RNA in human traumatic brain injury

The role of long noncoding RNAs has attracted significant attention in diseases. However, their expression characteristics in human traumatic brain injury are unclear.

The brain contusion tissues and tissues adjacent to the brain contusion from 6 server traumatic brain injury patients were used to analyze differential expression signatures of long noncoding RNAs and mRNAs via full-length transcriptome sequencing, Gene Ontology analysis, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analysis and establishment of a long noncoding RNA/mRNA coexpression network.

We identified 1720 long noncoding RNAs and 1632 mRNAs differential expression. Microarray analysis showed that 874 long noncoding RNAs and 1405 mRNAs were upregulated, 846 long noncoding RNAs and 227 mRNAs were downregulated. Subsequently, we used Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses to reveal signaling pathways that were associated with target genes. Then, a long noncoding RNA/mRNA coexpression network was generated, which showed an absolute correlation coefficient value >0.99 for 559 long noncoding RNA-mRNA pairs. Finally, we comprehensive analyzed long noncoding RNA/mRNA coexpression network and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway and found the top five pairs of long noncoding RNA/mRNA. Accordingly, we identified that long noncoding RNA tubulin beta 6 class V/nuclear factor E2-related factor 2 was most closely related to the pathological process after traumatic brain injury.

Our results indicated that the expression profiles of long noncoding RNAs and mRNAs were different after traumatic brain injury, providing new insight regarding long noncoding RNAs in human traumatic brain injury.