Patterns of immune infiltration in stable and raptured abdominal aortic aneurysms: A gene-expression-based retrospective study

• Published in: Gene 2020-12, Vol.762, p.145056-145056, Article 145056
• Main Authors: Lei, Chuxiang, Yang, Dan, Chen, Siliang, Chen, Wenlin, Sun, Xiaoning, Wu, Xiao, Chen, Mengyin, Li, Yuan, Zheng, Yuehong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abdominal aortic aneurysm; B cell; Immune infiltration; PTX3; T cells
• ISSN: 0378-1119; 1879-0038
• DOI: 10.1016/j.gene.2020.145056

•A novel algorithm to evaluate infiltrative immune cells in stable and ruptured AAA.•The composition of infiltrating immune cells in stable and ruptured AAA is different.•CD4+ T cells and other 7 types of immune cells are significantly different.•PTX3 was significantly overexpressed in rupture aneurysms. Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a disease characterized by weakening arterial wall and permanent expansion with high mortality once rupture, which was involved with immune system activation. However, owing to technical difficulties, previous research has limited the impact of one or limited immune cells on AAA. We analyzed the composition of immune cells using the CIBERSORT algorithm through transcriptome sequencing data from patients with stable (eAAA) and ruptured aneurysms (rAAA). The whole transcriptome sequencing data, including 17 patients with ruptured AAA and 31 patients with stable AAA were downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO, GSE98278). After normalizing and data processing, five rAAA and seventeen eAAA patients entered the follow-up analysis. We performed Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analysis to identify several pathways that were significantly enriched in rAAA compared to eAAA tissues. We demonstrated that the compositions of infiltrative immune cell in eAAA and rAAA were different. Naïve B cells, both resting and activated CD4+ memory T cells were found significantly higher in ruptured AAA, while memory B cells and activated mast cells were much less in ruptured AAA than that in stable AAA. Besides, PTX3 was significantly highly expressed in rAAA, which might be associated with the complement system and polarization of macrophages. Finally, differentially expressed genes and the related immune cells were mapped in a network to reveal the relationship between gene expression and infiltrative immune cells. We identified the infiltrated immune cell profile of eAAA and rAAA patients, which might be the potential target of AAA treatment.