Preeclampsia: a bioinformatics approach through protein-protein interaction networks analysis

We confirmed the well known relationship between preeclampsia and cardiovascular diseases but also identified statistically significant relationships with respect to cancer and aging. Moreover, significant metabolic pathways such as apoptosis, cancer and cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction have also been identified by enrichment analysis. We obtained FLT1, VEGFA, FN1, F2 and PGF genes with the highest scores by hubs analysis; however, we also found other genes as PDIA3, LYN, SH2B2 and NDRG1 with high scores.The applied methodology not only led to the identification of well known genes related to preeclampsia but also to propose new candidates poorly explored or completely unknown in the pathogenesis of preeclampsia, which eventually need to be validated experimentally. Moreover, new possible connections were detected between preeclampsia and other diseases that could open new areas of research. More must be done in this area to resolve the identification of unknown interactions of proteins/genes and also for a better integration of metabolic pathways and diseases.Preeclampsia is a pregnancy related disease associated with hypertension, proteinuria and increased maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality, without known underlying mechanism and preventive treatment [1,2]. On the other hand, the future health or possible risks of women with previous history of preeclampsia are important areas of investigation. In this direction, it is well known the increased risk of future cardiovascular disease and renal dysfunction, however, other risks are also being discussed [1,3-5]. Owing to the morbidity and mortality of this pregnancy related disease and the possible multifactorial causes involved [1-5], several experimental procedures have been applied by researchers in the last two decades, evidently, generating an elevated number of unprocessed information.Although some bioinformatic analysis has been performed in particular microarray assays [6,7], an extensive data