Linking the association between circRNAs and Alzheimer's disease progression by multi-tissue circular RNA characterization

Abstract

Alzheimers Disease (AD) has devastating consequences for patients during its slow, progressive course. It is important to understand the pathology of AD onset. Recently, circular RNAs (circRNAs) have been found to participate in many human diseases including cancers and neurodegenerative conditions. In this study, we mined the published dataset on the AMP-AD Knowledge Portal from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank (MSBB) to describe the circRNA profiles at different AD stage in brain samples from four AD patients brain regions, anterior prefrontal cortex, superior temporal lobe, parahippocampal gyrus, and inferior frontal gyrus. We found in total 147 circRNAs to be differentially expressed (DE) during AD progression in the four regions. We also characterized the mRNA-circRNA co-expression network and annotated the potential function of circRNAs based on the co-expressed modules. Based on our results, we propose that parahippocampal gyrus is the most circRNA-regulated region during the AD progression. The strongest negatively AD stage-correlated module in parahippocampal gyrus were enriched in cognitive disability and pathological-associated pathways such as synapse organization and regulation of membrane potential. Finally, the regression model based on the expression pattern of DE circRNAs in the module could help to distinguish the disease severity of patients, further supported the importance of circRNAs in AD pathology. In conclusion, our finding indicates that circRNAs in parahippocampal gyrus are possible regulators of AD progression and potentially be a therapeutic target or of AD.