Exploring the role of palmitoylation-related genes in atrial fibrillation and analysis of immune cell infiltration

This study aims to investigate the potential roles and mechanisms of palmitoylation-related key enzymes in atrial fibrillation (AF). AF gene expression data were obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus database, and differentially expressed genes were screened. Thirty palmitoylation-related enzymes were selected, and differentially expressed palmitoylation-related genes (DPRGs) were further screened. Random Forest, Support Vector Machine-Recursive Feature Elimination, and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression were used to screen DPRGs, and the intersection was taken as key palmitoylation-related genes (KPRGs). Their diagnostic performance was evaluated. Gene set enrichment analysis and gene set variation analysis were utilized to analyze the correlation between KPRGs and pathways, as well as their correlation with immune cells. Ten DPRGs were screened from the dataset (6 upregulated, 4 downregulated). Three algorithms yielded 6 KPRGs. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed that the combined area under the curve value of the 6 KPRGs was 0.827, indicating good diagnostic performance. Gene set enrichment analysis revealed that KPRGs were related to pathways such as extracellular matrix-receptor interaction, while gene set variation analysis showed positive and negative correlations with multiple pathways. Immune cell infiltration analysis demonstrated significant differences in the infiltration of 5 immune cell types in AF myocardial tissue, which were correlated with KPRGs expression. This study, for the first time, used bioinformatics techniques to screen and identify 6 key palmitoylation enzymes closely related to AF. These genes exhibit good diagnostic performance and are significantly correlated with multiple pathways and immune cell infiltration, providing clues for the study of AF mechanisms and the identification of therapeutic targets.