Circulating MicroRNAs as Biomarkers of Metabolic Syndrome

Metabolic syndrome is a common and complicated metabolic disorder and defined as a clustering of metabolic risk factors such as insulin resistance or diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia. The identification of accurate and effective biomarkers is beneficial to the early diagnosis and treatment of metabolic syndrome. Our study firstly detected the plasma miRNA expression profile of MetS patients compared with control group by high-throughput sequencing and integrated bioinformatics approaches. To our best knowledge, our study firstly perform high-throughput sequencing to obtain the circulating microRNA expression data in MetS plasma, and identified several potential plasma biomarkers for MetS. Total RNA from plasma samples were extracted using TRIzol LS Reagent (Invitrogen) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Then, sequencing libraries were generated by NEBNext Multiplex Small RNA Library Prep Set for Illumina (NEB) following the standardized protocols. Agilent Bioanalyzer 2100 system (Agilent) was used to qualified the sequencing libraries. Finally, the high-throughput next-generation sequencing was carried out using TruSeq Rapid SR Cluster Kit (Illumina) based on the Illumina NextSeq 500 sequencing platform (Illumina).