Multiple Sclerosis Stages and their Differentially Expressed Genes: A Bioinformatics Analysis

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory, chronic, autoimmune, and demyelinating disease of the central nervous system. MS is a heterogeneous disease with three main clinical forms, affecting the progression and therefore the treatment of the disease. Thus, finding key genes and microRNAs (miRNA) associated with MS stages and analyzing their interactions is important to better understand the molecular mechanism underlying the occurrence and the evolution of MS. Based on publicly available datasets of mRNA and miRNA expression profiles, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and differentially expressed miRNAs (DEMs) between patients with different stages of MS and healthy controls and between relapsing and remitting phases of RRMS were determined using Deseq2 and GEO2R tools. We then analyzed miRNA-mRNA regulatory interactions and gene ontology for the DEGs. Based on miRNA-mRNA regulatory interactions, we identified potential biomarkers of RRMS, 13 upregulated miRNA regulators of 30 downregulated genes and 17 downregulated miRNA regulators of 32 upregulated genes. We also identified 9 downregulated miRNA regulators of 12 upregulated genes as potential biomarkers of SPMS. Our study findings highlight some key protein-coding genes and miRNAs that are involved in the occurrence and evolution of MS.