Immune infiltration in inflammatory bowel disease based on Weighted gene co-expression networks

Background The global burden of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is high, and the incidence of IBD is on the rise in China, where the burden of inflammatory bowel disease will be a major public health challenge.Objective To screen differentially expressed genes based on the expression profile microarray data of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) from the Gene Expression Database , and to perform Weighted gene co-expression and immune cell infiltration analyses, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the pathogenesis of IBD.Methods Firstly, the GSE179285 microarray data were obtained from GEO database, WGCNA analysis was performed using R software, and the intersection with differentially expressed genes was taken to get the intersected genes, which were enriched and analysed using GO and KEGG; then, the protein interaction network was constructed and the core genes were identified; finally, the immune cell infiltration in IBD was analysed using CIBERSORT, and the correlation between immune cells and the core genes was analysed by using the Pearson correlation test to analyse the correlation between immune cells and core genes.Results and Conclusions IL-1B, CXCL1, CXCL9, CXCL11, CXCL2, LCN2, MMP1, IDO1, FCGR3A, and MMP3 were up-regulated in biopsy tissue samples from the IBD group, and the accuracy of predicting IBD using the above genes was high; immune cell infiltration analyses showed that neutrophils, activated CD4+ memory T-cells, and M1 macrophages in the IBD experimental group were significantly upregulated. In this paper, ten genes associated with IBD were identified by weighted gene co-expression network. The importance of immune cells such as CD4+ T cells, neutrophils, and macrophages in the pathogenesis of IBD was emphasised, providing new insights into the diagnosis of IBD and the study of the molecular mechanisms of immune cells.