Abstract 565: Genome-wide Mirna Expression Profiling and OPLS Discriminant Analysis in Hypertension and Cardiac Disease

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are regulators of gene expression and play a key role in the pathophysiology of various disease processes, namely cardiovascular disease. This study aimed at the identification of the miRNA expression pattern of peripheral blood mononuclear cells derived from hypertensive subjects (HT) and non-hypertensive subjects with cardiac disease (CD) using a genome-wide approach. Furthermore, we explored the potential of orthogonal partial least squares-discrimination analysis (OPLS-DA) to analyze miRNA expression data. The homogeneity of the population was assessed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and verified by the clear separation of the three groups on the basis of the miRNA expression levels. Moreover, local PCA of HT group indicates the splitting of this group in two distinct subgroups. This distinction correlates with two subject’s characteristics (smoking habits and history of myocardial infarction) that are closest to the CD group. OPLS-DA analysis confirms the separation of three groups and identified the most important miRNA to discrimination between groups. Among the most influential miRNA to the positive differentiation of HT from CD and control, several of them are relevant to endothelial dysfunction. On the other hand, miRNAs associated with angiogenesis positively differentiate CD from HT and control. Mir-186, a regulator of myogenin, is the most important miRNA to discriminate HT from CD. These results provide evidence of altered miRNA profile in hypertensives and cardiac disease and demonstrate that PCA and OPLS-DA are very useful and robust tools to analyze how different miRNAs contribute to the separations of groups and to find interesting patterns within the multidimensional data.