New Diagnostic and Therapeutic Targets for Spinal Cord Injury: GRN Gene

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a severe disabling disease due to the poor self-healing of the central nervous system. Studies showed that many N6-methyladenosine (m6A) RNA methylation profiles are hypomethylated after SCI, which are related to neural regeneration and different m6A marker genes. In addition, immune cell infiltration may significantly affect the development and progression of SCI. Therefore, we attempted to identify the correlation between SCI-related biomarkers and m6A methylation regulators in order to classify them. To this end, we collected two gene expression profile datasets (GSE464 and GSE45006) from the GEO database, performed differential expression analysis between pairs before and after SCI, and identified 19 constant differentially expressed genes (DEGs). We found that the constant differential genes were strongly correlated with m6A methylation regulators, which could modulate the immune microenvironment of SCI. Next, this paper used a consensus clustering algorithm to classify SCI patients into three subtypes. There are significant differences between 19 constant DEGs and 28 immune cells among different subtypes. Finally, the correlation analysis of the intersection genes between constant DEGs and immune genes was performed, and GRN was identified as a potential immune biomarker for SCI.