Characterization of gene expression profile in HBV-related liver fibrosis patients

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a leading risk factor for liver fibrosis (LF) and hepatocellular carcinoma. Emerging evidence indicates that host genetic, virological and immunological factors will influence the fibrotic progress. Many previous studies have focused on specific pathways or genes included in LF mechanism, however global view of the whole genome expresion profile in HBV related LF patients never been studied, and the mechanisms underlying the promotion of liver fibrosis progression remain obscure. Here we collected liver biopsy samples from 124 chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients and used Affymetrix HG U133 Plus 2.0 microarray to quantify the transcriptome of these patients. Through integrated data analysis, including geneset enrichment analysis (GSEA), weighted gene co-expression analysis (WGCNA), differential expressed gene (DEG) screening, trend test, principle component analysis (PCA) etc., we identified several key pathways and hub genes participated in the initiation and exacerbation of liver fibrotic progress. The function of these hub genes were also validated by in vitro and in vivo experiments using HepG2, Huh7 and LX-2 cell lines and transgenic mice. This is the first large-scale study investigating the gene expression profile in HBV-related LF patients which will be crucial for unlocking the gene functions and gene-gene correlations in fibrosis progess.

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Wang M, Gong Q, Zhang J, Chen L, Zhang Z, Lu L, Yu D, Han Y, Zhang D, Chen P, Zhang X, Yuan Z, Huang J, Zhang X