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Are there other factors regulating the expression of these biomarkers?

Posted by zimmerph on 10 Mar 2016 at 14:37 GMT

Dear Authors,
Thank you for your excellent publication and thorough work!
We were wondering how specific these biomarkers are and if they could potentially be regulated by other factors. To find out, we used GENEVESTIGATOR (www.genevestigator.com), choosing the Affymetrix Human 133 Plus2 curated compendium (54'000 arrays, over 3700 conditions). The results showed that C1QB, C1QC and LRG1 (A2GL) are strongly up-regulated in response to septic shock, psoriasis, rosacea, mycosis and clear cell carcinoma. This group of genes was strongly downregulated in ALL leukemia patients. Another cluster involving EFEMP1 (FBLN3), C1S, C1QB and C1QC were strongly upregulated in response to kidney transplantation, Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis. A third cluster including PTPRZ1, EFEMP1 and C1S showed strong up-regulation in some forms of brain tumor while they were strongly down-regulated in ovarian tumors and some forms of pancreatic tumors.
It would be interesting to find out how these markers perform in populations having one or the other of these diseases, especially the more common ones.
In a second step, we checked whether the GENEVESTIGATOR biomarker tools would find similar genes. Our search was done selecting AD versus healthy individuals comparisons compared to all other 3700 experimental conditions. The three most AD specific genes were ERC2-IT1, IQCA1, SRCIN1. Did they appear in any of your top lists?
Best regards,
Philip Zimmermann

No competing interests declared.
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