Discovering the signature of a lupus-related microRNA profile in the Gene Expression Omnibus repository

Lupus is one of the most prevalent systemic autoimmune diseases. It is a multifactorial disease in which genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors play significant roles. The pathogenesis of lupus is not yet well understood. However, deregulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) – one of the post-transcriptional regulators of genes – can contribute to the development of autoimmune diseases. Over the last two decades, advances in the profiling of miRNA using microarray have received much attention, and it has been demonstrated that miRNAs play a regulatory role in the pathogenesis of lupus. Therefore, dysregulated miRNAs can be considered as promising diagnostic biomarkers for lupus. This article is an overview of lupus-related miRNA profiling studies and arrays in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. The aims of our study were to widen current knowledge of known dysregulated miRNAs as potential biomarkers of SLE and to introduce a bioinformatics approach to using microarray data and finding novel miRNA and gene candidates for further study. We identified hsa-miR-4709-5p, hsa-miR-140, hsa-miR-145, hsa-miR-659, hsa-miR-134, hsa-miR-150, hsa-miR-584, hsa-miR-409 and hsa-miR-152 as potential biomarkers by integrated bioinformatics analysis.