Abstract
Inflammatory reaction of pulp tissue plays a role in the pathogen elimination and tissue repair. The evaluation of severity of pulpitis can serve an instructive function in therapeutic scheme. However, there are many limitations in the traditional evaluation methods for the severity of pulpitis. Based on the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, our study discovered 843 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) related to pulpitis. Afterwards, we constructed a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network of DEGs and used MCODE plugin to determine the key functional subset. Meanwhile, genes in the key functional subset were subjected to GO and KEGG enrichment analyses. The result showed that genes were mainly enriched in inflammatory reaction-related functions. Next, we screened out intersections of PPI network nodes and pulpitis-related genes. Then, 20 genes were obtained as seed genes. In the PPI network, 50 genes that had the highest correlation with seed genes were screened out using random walk with restart (RWR). Furthermore, 4 pulpitis-related hub genes were obtained from the intersection of the top 50 genes and genes in the key functional subset. Finally, GeneMANIA was utilized to predict genes coexpressed with hub genes, and expression levels of the 4 hub genes in normal and pulpitis groups were analyzed based on GEO data. The result demonstrated that the 4 hub genes were mainly coexpressed with chemokine-related genes and were remarkably upregulated in the pulpitis group. In short, we eventually determined 4 potential biomarkers of pulpitis.
Highlights
Pulpitis tissue is located in the dental pulp cavity composed of dentin, tooth enamel, and cementum, which can produce dentin, provide nutrition, and serve a supportive and protective role [1]
With the normal group as the control, differential expression analysis was performed on the pulpitis group (∣logFC ∣ >1, FDR < 0:05)
The analysis outcome manifested that 843 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were obtained, in which 660 genes were significantly upregulated while 183 genes were remarkably downregulated (Supplementary Table 1) (Figure 2(a))
Summary
Pulpitis tissue is located in the dental pulp cavity composed of dentin, tooth enamel, and cementum, which can produce dentin, provide nutrition, and serve a supportive and protective role [1]. Pathogenic microorganism infection can cause pulpitis and treatments depend on disease severity. Treatments on reversible pulpitis include direct pulp capping, indirect pulp capping, and pulp chamber pulpotomy, while irreversible pulpitis is usually treated with root canal therapy [2]. Precise assessment on the severity of pulpitis is crucial to select appropriate therapy plans. The assessment is mainly based on the degree of pain, pulp sensitivity test, and medical histories of patients, which is not effective and precise enough [2,3,4]. As a result, using pulpitis-related biomarkers to construct a precise evaluation scheme for pulpitis has become a hot research area
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