Identification of T cell stress response state (TSTR) and key genes related to T cells in discoid lupus erythematosus

The malignant transformation risk and high misdiagnosis rate of discoid lupus erythematosus (DLE) render it an urgent necessity to deeply explore its pathogenesis and biomarkers. This research, through the combined analysis of transcriptome data and single-cell sequencing data, commencing from the highly infiltrated T cells in DLE and the significant inflammation and cytokine correlation manifested by T cells, undertakes re-clustering analysis of T cells and identifies the stress response state T cells (T_STR) that are abundantly infiltrated in the dermis of DLE. Furthermore, by screening for the common genes among the differentially expressed genes in the transcriptome, the differentially expressed genes of T cells in single-cell sequencing, and the key module genes in WGCNA, CXCL13, GNLY, IFI6, IFI27, IFI44, IFI44L, MX1, and TIGIT are ultimately extracted as the key disease genes of DLE, and these genes are closely associated with the mechanism regulating T cell function. Specifically, through supplementary validation of gene expression using the psoriasis dataset, the distinctively high expression characteristics of CXCL13 and GNLY in DLE were revealed, thereby corroborating their central status as characteristic markers of DLE.