Immune Infiltration-Related Biomarker ProteinO-Glucosyltransferase 1 to Diagnose Osteoporosis

Background: Osteoporosis (OP) is a systemic skeletal disease. Nowadays, still, there is a lack of effective biomarkers to estimate its treatment outcomes.Methods: The weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) was used to build a weighted co-expression network to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Then, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) logistic regression and Boruta package were used to determine the diagnostic indicators of OP. The single sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGESA) was further performed to estimate the association between diagnostic indicators and infiltrating immune cells in OP. Biomarker-related pathway enrichment analysis was performed using Gene set variation analysis (GSVA).Results: Totally, 1073 genes and 17 modules were screened in this study. ProteinO-glucosyltransferase 1 (POGLUT1) and Src kinase-associated phosphoprotein 2 (SKAP2) were found to be diagnostic indicators for OP (area under curve (AUC)P OGLUT 1 = 0.790, AUCSKAP 2 = 0.540). POGLUT1 expression was related to OP phenotypes (bone mineral density (BMD) and menopausal, p < 0.05). In immune cell infiltration evaluation, POGLUT1 expression was significantly associated with infiltration of iDCs (immature dendritic cells, p = 0.027), Tfh (T Follicular helper cell, p = 0.001) and T cell co-inhibition (p = 0.002) in the OP. In addition, POGLUT1 was correlated with Interleukin 6 (IL6) , Janus kinase (JAK), transduction and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) signaling, p53 pathway, Interleukin 2 (IL2) transduction and activator of transcription 5 (STAT5) signaling, bile acid metabolism and heme metabolism. Thus, it can be considered as marker for OP early identification and therapy.Conclusions: POGLUT1 may serve as potential diagnostic marker for OP. Compared with SKAP2, POGLUT1 showed a stronger relation with OP phenotypes what provided some insights into OP underlying mechanism.