Gene expression analysis reveals the dysregulation of immune and metabolic pathways in Alzheimer's disease

// Juan Chen 1,* , Chuncheng Xie 2,* , Yanhong Zhao 3,* , Zhiyan Li 1 , Panpan Xu 1 and Lifen Yao 1 1 Department of Neurology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China 2 Department of Neurosurgery, The First Affiliated Hospital, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China 3 Department of Internal Hematology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Lifen Yao, email: // Keywords : Alzheimer’s disease; pathway analysis; expression data; Pathology Section Received : June 29, 2016 Accepted : September 28, 2016 Published : October 06, 2016 Abstract In recent years, several pathway analyses of genome-wide association studies reported the involvement of metabolic and immune pathways in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Until now, the exact mechanisms of these pathways in AD are still unclear. Here, we conducted a pathway analysis of a whole genome AD case-control expression dataset ( n =41, 25 AD cases and 16 controls) from the human temporal cortex tissue. Using the differently expressed AD genes, we identified significant KEGG pathways related to metabolism and immune processes. Using the up- and down- regulated AD gene list, we further found up-regulated AD gene were significantly enriched in immune and metabolic pathways. We further compare the immune and metabolic KEGG pathways from the expression dataset with those from previous GWAS datasets, and found that most of these pathways are shared in both GWAS and expression datasets.