Identification of Diagnostic Genes and Effective Drugs Associated with Osteoporosis Treatment by Single-Cell RNA-Seq Analysis and Network Pharmacology

BACKGROUND: Osteoporosis is a common bone metabolic disease with increased bone fragility and fracture rate. Effective diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis still need to be explored due to the increasing incidence of disease. METHODS: Single-cell RNA-seq was acquired from GSE147287 dataset. Osteoporosis-related genes were obtained from chEMBL. Cell subpopulations were identified and characterized by scRNA-seq, t-SNE, clusterProfiler, and other computational methods. “limma” R packages were used to identify all differentially expressed genes. A diagnosis model was build using rms R packages. Key drugs were determined by proteins-proteins interaction and molecular docking. RESULTS: Firstly, 15,577 cells were obtained, and 12 cell subpopulations were identified by clustering, among which 6 cell subpopulations belong to CD45+ BM-MSCs and the other subpopulations were CD45-BM-MSCs. CD45- BM-MSCs_6 and CD45+ BM-MSCs_5 were consider as key subpopulations. Furthermore, we found 7 genes were correlated with above two subpopulations, and F9 gene had highest AUC. Finally, five compounds were identified, among which DB03742 bound well to F9 protein. CONCLUSIONS: This work discovered that 7 genes were correlated with CD45-BM-MSCs_6 and CD45+ BM-MSCs_5 subpopulations in osteoporosis, among which F9 gene had better research value. Moreover, compound DB03742 was a potential inhibitor of F9 protein.