Fig. 1.

miRNA profiling of the blood plasma of AD patients and cognitively normal controls. (A). PCA analysis of the normalized expression values of plasma miRNA, showing the separation between AD patients and controls on the first principal component. (B). Heat map showing the clustering of differentially expressed miRNAs. (C). Volcano plot displaying the fold change and p value of DEMs, with the labeling of all DEMs with |log2-fold change| >1 and FDR adjusted p < 0.05. (D). miRNA–mRNA regulatory network visualization for the enrichment analysis of DEMs. The size of miRNA nodes indicated the number of their target genes. Red circles represent DEMs and pink/green circles are their target genes, which green circles also are cognitive dysfunction related genes. (E) Gene Ontology biological process terms and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways in enrichment analysis of DEMs targets. Dot size represents the fold enrichment. The color of each dot represents the category of ontology, and the X-axis represents the p-value. (F). Quantitative RT-PCR validation of the expression of miR-140 and miR-122 in the plasma of AD patients and controls. The results were presented as means ± SD (n ≥ 9). (G-H). Quantitative RT-PCR data showing the expression of miR-140 (G) and miR-122 (H) in the cortex and the hippocampi of C57BL/6J mice and the APP/PS1 mice, respectively. The results were presented as means ± SD (n ≥ 3). *p < 0.05, ** p < 0. 01. Statistical analyses were performed using a two-tailed unpaired Student’s t-test