Journal
PLOS GENETICS
Volume 13, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1006952
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Foundation grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [CIHR FDN 14332]
- Guillimin high performance computing cluster by Compute Canada
- Calcul Quebec [jrt-675-01]
- CIHR fellowship [MFE-127384]
- Laboratory of Excellence Integrative Biology of Emerging Infectious Diseases
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Leprosy is a human infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae. A strong host genetic contribution to leprosy susceptibility is well established. However, the modulation of the transcriptional response to infection and the mechanism(s) of disease control are poorly understood. To address this gap in knowledge of leprosy pathogenicity, we conducted a genome-wide search for expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) that are associated with transcript variation before and after stimulation with M. leprae sonicate in whole blood cells. We show that M. leprae antigen stimulation mainly triggered the upregulation of immune related genes and that a substantial proportion of the differential gene expression is genetically controlled. Indeed, using stringent criteria, we identified 318 genes displaying ciseQTL at an FDR of 0.01, including 66 genes displaying response-eQTL (reQTL), i.e. ciseQTL that showed significant evidence for interaction with the M. leprae stimulus. Such reQTL correspond to regulatory variations that affect the interaction between human whole blood cells and M. leprae sonicate and, thus, likely between the human host and M. leprae bacilli. We found that reQTL were significantly enriched among binding sites of transcription factors that are activated in response to infection, and that they were enriched among single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with susceptibility to leprosy per se and TypeI Reaction, and seven of them have been targeted by recent positive selection. Our study suggested that natural selection shaped our genomic diversity to face pathogen exposure including M. leprae infection.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available