Overview of Transcriptomic Research on Type 2 Diabetes: Challenges and Perspectives

Abstract

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a common chronic disease whose etiology is known to have a strong genetic component. Standard genetic approaches, although allowing for the detection of a number of gene variants associated with the disease as well as differentially expressed genes, cannot fully explain the hereditary factor in T2D. The explosive growth in the genomic sequencing technologies over the last decades provided an exceptional impetus for transcriptomic studies and new approaches to gene expression measurement, such as RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) and single-cell technologies. The transcriptomic analysis has the potential to find new biomarkers to identify risk groups for developing T2D and its microvascular and macrovascular complications, which will significantly affect the strategies for early diagnosis, treatment, and preventing the development of complications. In this article, we focused on transcriptomic studies conducted using expression arrays, RNA-seq, and single-cell sequencing to highlight recent findings related to T2D and challenges associated with transcriptome experiments.

Keywords: RNA-seq; gene expression; microarray; single-cell; transcriptome; type 2 diabetes.

Figure 1

Comparison of approaches to gene expression analysis.

Figure 2

(a) Venn diagram showing the overlap between genes at significant GWAS loci for T2D and DEGs identified using RNA-seq and arrays in T2D patients; (b) A bar plot showing false discovery rate-adjusted enrichment p-values for the top 10 gene sets with a significant enrichment among 107 T2D DEGs identified by both transcriptomic studies and GWAS.