Impact of high fat diet on long non-coding RNAs and messenger RNAs expression in the aortas of ApoE(−/−) mice

Atherosclerosis is a chronic multifactorial inflammatory disease with high prevalence worldwide, and has become the leading cause of death. The present study was designed to investigate the impact of high-fat diet on ApoE(−/−) mice exhibiting atherosclerosis by detecting the genome-wide expression profile of lncRNAs and mRNAs. A total of 354 differentially expressed lncRNAs were identified (≥2.0 folds). Simultaneously, 357 differentially expressed mRNAs from the same chip were found. The expression differences of lncRNAs and mRNAs were consistent in both qPCR and microarray detection. Annotation results of the mRNAs which correlated with lncRNAs showed that the commonly related pathways were metabolism and inflammation. Hypergeometric distribution analysis indicated that the differentially expressed lncRNAs had been mostly regulated by transcription factors (TFs) such as Myod1, Rxra, Pparg, Tcf3, etc. Additional lncRNA-target-TFs network analysis was conducted for the top 20 differentially expressed lncRNAs. The results indicated Hnf4a, Ppara, Vdr, and Runx3 as the TFs most likely to regulate the production of these lncRNAs, and might play roles in inflammatory and metabolic processes in atherosclerosis. In a nutshell, the present study identified a panel of dysregulated lncRNAs and mRNAs that may be potential biomarkers or drug targets relevant to the high-fat diet related atherogenesis.