Integrated Bioinformatics Analysis Reveals the Aberrantly Methylated Differentially Expressed Genes in Dilated Cardiomyopathy.

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) causes heart failure and sudden death. Epigenetics is crucial in cardiomyopathy susceptibility and progression; however, the relationship between epigenetics, particularly DNA methylation, and DCM remains unknown. Therefore, this study identified aberrantly methylated differentially expressed genes (DEGs) associated with DCM using bioinformatics analysis and characterized their clinical utility in DCM. DNA methylation expression profiles and transcriptome data from public datasets of human DCM and healthy control cardiac tissues were obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus public datasets. Then an epigenome-wide association study was performed. DEGs were identified in both DCM and healthy control cardiac tissues. In total, 3,353 cytosine-guanine dinucleotide sites annotated to 2,818 mRNAs were identified, and 479 DCM-related genes were identified. Subsequently, core genes were screened using logistic, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, random forest, and support vector machine analyses. The overlapping of these genes resulted in DEGs with abnormal methylation patterns. Cross-tabulation analysis identified 8 DEGs with abnormal methylation. Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction confirmed the expression of aberrantly methylated DEGs in mice. In DCM murine cardiac tissues, the expressions of