Abstract
Immune cell–mediated chronic inflammation is one of the causes of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Therefore, identifying inflammatory markers in circulating immune cells is highly important for predicting insulin resistance (IR) and the occurrence of T2DM. In this study, we discovered that differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from T2DM patients were associated with innate immunity and chronic inflammatory responses through bulk transcriptome sequencing (bulk RNA-seq). Gene integration analysis revealed that nine DEGs were upregulated, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that V-maf musculoaponeurotic fibrosarcoma oncogene homolog B (MAFB), a candidate biomarker, has a certain predictive value for T2DM. In population-based cohort studies, we found that MAFB expression was significantly upregulated in the PBMCs of T2DM patients and was significantly correlated with homeostasis model assessment of IR (HOMA-IR), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), adiponectin (Adipoq), etc. We further evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of MAFB and other clinical parameters for predicting and diagnosing T2DM and found that MAFB expression in PBMCs had a positive effect on the prediction and diagnosis of T2DM. Finally, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) analysis revealed that the increase in MAFB expression was mainly in nonclassical monocytes. Our results suggest that increased MAFB expression in circulating monocytes may mediate chronic inflammatory status in patients with T2DM. Therefore, MAFB gene expression in circulating monocytes has certain clinical significance for predicting and assisting in the diagnosis of T2DM.
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The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repositories/repositories and accession numbers can be found in the article/supplementary material.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the participants for their participation in this study. We thank the Department of Endocrinology of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University for providing professional guidance. The authors thank the professional platform provided by the Key Laboratory of Clinical Laboratory Diagnostics of Ministry of Education, College of Laboratory Medicine, Chongqing Medical University.
Funding
This study was funded by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2022MD713711] and the Chongqing Natural Science Foundation Project—Postdoctoral Science Foundation Project [2022NSCQ-BHX0670].
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WLZ and WYC made equal contributions to this work. WLZ: Conceptualization, project administration, validation, writing—original draft. WYC: Data curation, supervision, visualization, writing—review and editing. JWL: Formal analysis, validation, writing—review and editing. JL: Data curation, validation, writing—review and editing. MLY: Data curation, formal analysis, methodology, writing—original draft. LL: Conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision, writing—review and editing. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
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Approval was obtained from the ethics committee of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University (Data:12.06.2022 Ratification No. 121/2022). The procedures used in this study were performed in strict adherence to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. This animal study was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Chongqing Medical University (Data: 08.05.2023. Approval No. IACUC-CQMU-2023–06021). The study was conducted in accordance with local legislation and institutional requirements.
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Zhang, W., Chen, W., Lei, J. et al. The Expression of MAFB Gene in Circulating Monocytes Is Related to Chronic Inflammatory Status in T2DM Patients. Inflammation (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10753-024-02012-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10753-024-02012-7