Dynamic Changes And Differential Expression Of Circulating LncRNAs After Severe Traumatic Brain Injury In Adults

Background:Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are pervasively transcribed and have been shown to regulate key biological processes that maintain normal cellular functions. Abnormal regulation of these lncRNA can promote a variety of diseases through resulting aberrant cellular essential functions. However, the role that lncRNA play in the development of traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains unknown. With this work we aimed to show the expression profile of lncRNA in the plasma of TBI patients compared with that of non-TBI persons using microarray analysis in order to interrogate potential molecular mechanisms of TBI from the lncRNA level.Methods:In this study, total RNA was isolated from12samples of plasma tissue,9traumatic and3non-traumatic respectively, and subjected to One-Color Microarray-Based Gene Expression Analysis. Bioinformatics’analysis including gene ontology (GO) analysis and pathway analysis was done for further investigation.Results:We found232up-regulated and63down-regulated (with more than2-fold changed expression level) lncRNA at each time-point post traumatic brain injury. Pathway analysis indicated that16pathways corresponded to up-regulated transcripts and those10pathways corresponded to down-regulated transcripts (p-value cut-off is0.01). GO analysis showed that the highest enriched GOs targeted by up-regulated transcripts were complement and coagulation cascades. In addition, one of the highest enriched GOs targeted by the downregulated transcripts were natural killer cell mediated cytotoxicity.Conclusion:Our study is the first to interrogate differentially expressed lncRNA in traumatic brain injury and indicates that lncRNA have the potential to be used as novel candidate biomarkers for the clinical diagnosis and potential therapeutic targets of traumatic brain injury in the future.