Comparison of Blood Transcriptomic Profiles of Healthy, T2D and Diabetic Nephropathy (DN) Reveals FTO as a potential target for DN

To identify the potential regulators in the progression of diabetic nephropathy (DN), we performed RNA sequencing of blood samples from healthy volunteers, patients with T2D, and patients with DN. Further analyses revealed that FTO was significantly downregulated in blood samples of T2D and DN patients, while the expression of other erasers, writers or readers remained unchanged between disease and healthy groups . Our study thus provides potential molecular mechanisms for DN progression and association of differential gene expression with the functional and structural changes observed in patients with DN. A total of 28 patients with biopsy-proven DN hospitalized from January 2015 to December 2016 in Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital were enrolled in the study. Nine control human kidney samples were obtained from the unaffected portion of tumor nephrectomies. RNA-seq was performed on 28 DN and 9 control samples.