Differences in gene expression profiles in early and late stage rhodesiense HAT individuals in Malawi

by Peter Nambala, Julius Mulindwa, Harry Noyes, Vincent Pius Alibu, Barbara Nerima, Joyce Namulondo, Oscar Nyangiri, Enock Matovu, Annette MacLeod, Janelisa Musaya, on behalf of the TrypanoGEN+ Research Group as Members of the H3Africa ConsortiumT.b.rhodesiense is the causative agent of Rhodesian human African trypanosomiasis (r-HAT) in Malawi. Clinical presentation of r-HAT in Malawi varies between foci and differs from East African HAT clinical phenotypes. The purpose of this study was to gain more insights into the transcriptomic profiles of patients with early stage 1 and late stage 2 HAT disease in Malawi. Whole blood from individuals infected withT.b.rhodesiense was used for RNA-Seq. Control samples were from healthy trypanosome negative individuals matched on sex, age range, and disease foci. Illumina sequence FASTQ reads were aligned to the GRCh38 release 84 human genome sequence using HiSat2 and differential analysis was done in R Studio using the DESeq2 package. XGR, ExpressAnalyst and InnateDB algorithms were used for functional annotation and gene enrichment analysis of significant differentially expressed genes. RNA-seq was done on 23 r-HAT case samples and 28 healthy controls with 7 controls excluded for downstream analysis as outliers. A total of 4519 genes were significant differentially expressed (p adjusted
Source: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - Category: Tropical Medicine Authors: Source Type: research