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. 2023 Nov 24;24(23):16725.
doi: 10.3390/ijms242316725.

Transcriptional Landscape of Repetitive Elements in Psoriatic Skin from Large Cohort Studies: Relevance to Psoriasis Pathophysiology

Vidya S Krishnan  1   2 , Sulev Kõks  1   2
Affiliations

Transcriptional Landscape of Repetitive Elements in Psoriatic Skin from Large Cohort Studies: Relevance to Psoriasis Pathophysiology

Vidya S Krishnan et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

While studies demonstrating the expression of repetitive elements (REs) in psoriatic skin using RNA-seq have been published before, not many studies have focused on the genome-wide expression patterns using larger cohorts. This study investigated the transcriptional landscape of differentially expressed REs in lesional and non-lesional skin from two previously published large datasets. We observed significant differential expression of REs in lesional psoriatic skin as well as the skin of healthy controls. Significant downregulation of several ERVs, HERVs (including HERV-K) and LINEs was observed in lesional psoriatic skin from both datasets. The upregulation of a small subset of HERV-Ks and Alus in lesional psoriatic skin was also reported. An interesting finding from this expression data was the significant upregulation and overlapping of tRNA repetitive elements in lesional and non-lesional psoriatic skin. The data from this study indicate the potential role of REs in the immunopathogenesis of psoriasis. The expression data from the two independent large study cohorts are powerful enough to confidently verify the differential expression of REs in relation to psoriatic skin pathology. Further studies are warranted to understand the functional impact of these repetitive elements in psoriasis pathogenesis, thereby expanding their significance as a potential targeting pathway for the disease treatment of psoriasis and other inflammatory diseases.

Keywords: HERV; LINE-1 element; psoriasis; repetitive elements; tRNA; transcriptomics.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Heat map of 25 TEs with largest fold change differences between lesional psoriatic samples and healthy controls from dataset GSE54456. Orange bar is for lesional psoriatic (LP) samples and green bar is for controls (C).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Heat map of 25 REs with largest fold change differences between lesional and healthy controls from dataset GSE121212. Orange bar is for lesional psoriatic skin (LP) samples and green bar is for control (C) samples.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Heat map of 25 REs with largest fold change differences between non-lesional and healthy controls from dataset GSE121212. Orange bar is for non-lesional psoriatic skin (NLP) samples and green bar is for control (C) samples.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Heat map of 25 REs with largest fold change differences between lesional and non-lesional samples from dataset GSE121212. Orange bar is for lesional psoriatic skin (LP) samples and green bar is for non-lesional (NLP) samples.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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