Obstructive renal injury and drug-induced nephrotoxicity are the two most common causes of renal
fibrosis diseases. However, whether these two different pathogeny induced same pathological outcomes contain common genetic targets or signaling pathway, the current research has not paid great attention. GSE121190 and GSE35257 were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. While GSE121190 represents a differential expression profile in kidney of mice with unilateral
ureteral obstruction (UUO) model, GSE35257 represents
cisplatin nephrotoxicity model. By using GEO2R, 965 differential expression genes (DEGs) in GSE121190 and 930 DEGs in GSE35257 were identified. 43 co-DEGs were shared and were extracted for
protein-
protein interaction (PPI) analysis. Subsequently, three shared pathways including glycolysis/gluconeogenesis,
fatty acid degradation and pathways in
cancer were involved in two models with Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analysis. We reconfirmed that these three pathways have relatively high scores by using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) software. Additionally, further bioinformatic analysis showed that
Aldehyde dehydrogenase-2 (Aldh2) involved in the progression of renal
fibrosis by mediating glycolysis pathway. Then real-time PCR and western blotting were performed to validate the expression of Aldh2 in kidney tissue after three different etiologies that caused renal
fibrosis. Basically consistent with our bioinformatics results, our experiment showed that the expression of Aldh2 is the most significantly decreased in the UUO model, followed by
ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) model and finally the
cisplatin-induced model. Thus, Aldh2 can act as a common potential genetic target for different renal
fibrosis diseases.