Revealing a novel contributing landscape of ferroptosis-related genes in Parkinson’s disease

Transcriptomics studies have yielded great insights into disease processes by detecting differentially expressed genes (DEGs). In this study, due to the high heritability of Parkinson’s disease (PD), we performed bioinformatics analyses on nine transcriptomic datasets regarding substantia nigra from Gene Expression Omnibus database, including seven microarray datasets and two next-generation sequencing datasets. As a result, between age-matched PD patients and normal control, we identified 630 DEGs, of which 22 hub DEGs involved in PD or ferroptosis were found to be associated with each other at the transcriptional level and protein-protein interaction network, suggesting their high correlations among these hub genes. Moreover, 16 DEGs were singled out due to their comparable AUC (>0.6) in random forest classifiers, including seven PD-related genes (MAP4K4, LRP10, UCHL1, PAM, RIT2, SNCA, GCH1) and nine ferroptosis-related genes (GCH1, DDIT4, RGS4, MAPK9, CAV1, RELA, DUSP1, ATP6V1G2, ATF4 and ISCU). Furthermore, to probe the potential of those hub genes in predicting the PD progression and survival, we constructed a Cox model featured by an eight-gene signature, including four PD-related genes (SNCA, UCHL1, LRP10, and GCH1) and four ferroptosis-related genes (DDIT4, RGS4, RELA, and CAV1), and validated it successful in an independent dataset, indicating that it would be an effective tool for clinical research to predict PD progression. In conclusion, ferroptosis-related DEGs identified in this study were closely correlated with the known PD-related genes, revealing the involvement of ferroptosis in the development of PD. This study presented the potential of several ferroptosis-related genes as novel clinical biomarkers for PD.