AUTHOR=Guo Hui-qing , Xue Rong , Wan Guangming 

TITLE=Identification of biomarkers associated with ferroptosis in diabetic retinopathy based on WGCNA and machine learning

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics

VOLUME=Volume 15 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2024.1376771

DOI=10.3389/fgene.2024.1376771

ISSN=1664-8021

ABSTRACT=Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a chronic progressive eye disease that affects millions of diabetic patients worldwide, and ferroptosis may contribute to the underlying mechanisms of DR. The main objective of this work is to explore key genes associated with ferroptosis in DR and to determine their feasibility as diagnostic markers. In this study, WGCNA identify the most relevant signature modules in DR.Machine learning methods were used to de-screen the feature genes. ssGSEA calculated the scoring of immune cells in the DR versus control samples and compared the associations with the core genes by Spearman correlation. Finally, we identified 2897 differential genes in DR versus normal samples. WGCNA found tan module to have the highest correlation with DR patients. And 20 intersecting genes were obtained from differential genes, tan module and ferroptosis genes, which were screened by LASSO and SVM-RFE method, and together identified 6 genes as potential diagnostic markers. qPCR verified the expression and ROC curves confirmed the diagnostic accuracy of the 6 genes. In addition, our ssGSEA scoring identified these 6 core genes as closely associated with immune infiltrating cells. In conclusion, we analyzed for the first time the potential link between ferroptosis and DR, which has important implications for future studies of ferroptosis-mediated pro-inflammatory immune mechanisms.