TRANSCRIPT-LEVEL INVESTIGATION OF CELLULAR RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL PERTURBATIONS

Abstract

Perturbations of the environment elicit complicated cellular responses on the transcriptomic level that affect gene expression and regulatory cascades. The purpose of the study was to examine transcript-level changes related to environmental stress based on publicly available datasets of gene expression. Differential expression analysis revealed that 428 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) contained 236 upregulated and 192 downregulated genes (|human|>Differential expression analysis showed that 428 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) contained 236 upregulated and 192 downregulated genes (|human|>Differentiation expression analysis revealed that 428 different The functional enrichment analysis demonstrated that DEGs play an important role in the oxidative stress response, inflammatory signaling, and apoptosis-related mechanisms. Gene ontology (GO) was found to be enriched in such biological processes as cellular response to stress and transcriptional regulation. Pathway analysis using Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) revealed important pathways, such as MAPK signaling, NF-signaling, and cytokine-cytotokine receptor interactions. The network assembly of protein-protein interactions (PPI) determined IL6, TP53, AKT1, and TNF as major hub genes with high-connectivity. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves analysis showed that these genes have high diagnostic performance with the area under the curve (AUC) of between 0.84 and 0.92. On the whole, the observations aid in understanding the molecular pathways of cellular response to environmental disruptions and also identify possible transcriptomic biomarkers of stress.