Integrated bioinformatics analysis of As, Au, Cd, Pb and Cu heavy metal responsive marker genes through Arabidopsis thaliana GEO datasets

BACKGROUND: Current environmental pollution factors, particularly the distribution and diffusion of heavy metals in soil and water, are a high risk to local environments and humans. Despite striking advances in methods to detect contaminants by a variety of chemical and physical solutions, these methods have inherent limitations such as small dimensions and very low coverage. Therefore, identifying novel contaminant biomarkers are urgently needed. METHODS: To better track heavy metal contaminations in soil and water, integrated bioinformatics analysis to identify biomarkers of relevant heavy metal, such as As, Cd, Pb and Cu, is a suitable method for long-term and large-scale surveys of such heavy metal pollutants. Subsequently, the accuracy and stability of the results screened were experimentally validated by quantitative PCR experiment. RESULTS: We obtained 168 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) which contained 59 up-regulated genes and 109 down-regulated genes through comparative bioinformatics analyses. Subsequently, the gene ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichments of these DEGs were performed, respectively. GO analyses found that these DEGs were mainly related to responses to chemicals, responses to stimulus, responses to stress, responses to abiotic stimulus, and so on. KEGG pathway analyses of DEGs were mainly involved in the protein degradation process and other biologic process, such as the phenylpropanoid biosynthesis pathways and nitrogen metabolism. Moreover, we also speculated that nine candidate core biomarker genes (namely, NILR1, PGPS1, WRKY33, BCS1, AR781, CYP81D8, NR1, EAP1 and MYB15) might be tightly correlated with the response or transport of heavy metals. Finally, experimental results displayed that these genes had the same expression trend response to different stresses as mentioned above (Cd, Pb and Cu) and no mentioned above (Zn and Cr). CONCLUSION: In general, the identified biomarker genes could help us understand the potential molecular mechanisms or signaling pathways responsive to heavy metal stress in plants, and could be applied as marker genes to track heavy metal pollution in soil and water through detecting their expression in plants growing in those environments.