A transcriptome analysis study on mRNA and long non-coding RNAs in patients with Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, affecting ~2–3% of people over 65 years of age. Recent studies have revealed that the molecular pathogenesis of PD involves a series of pathways and neurobiological processes, such as protein degradation, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, autophagy, calcium homeostasis, axonal transport, and neuroinflammation, all suggesting that both the onset and course of PD is a complex multilevel and systematic process. Accumulating evidence demonstrates that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) affect the pathogenesis of several diseases, such as cancers, immunological diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and PD. Next generation sequencing provides a high-throughput method for exploring the diverse polyadenylated RNA populations. This approach allows accurate identification and quantitation of mRNAs and other non-coding RNAs, such as lncRNAs. The present study explored mRNAs and lncRNAs expression by using the next generation sequencing analysis (NGS) and the quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) assay for the confirmation of the NGS results, followed by functional analysis of the results.