scholarly journals Vitamin D-regulated Gene Expression Profiles: Species-specificity and Cell-specific Effects on Metabolism and Immunity

Endocrinology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 162 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vassil Dimitrov ◽  
Camille Barbier ◽  
Aiten Ismailova ◽  
Yifei Wang ◽  
Katy Dmowski ◽  
...  

Abstract Vitamin D has pleiotropic physiological actions including immune system regulation, in addition to its classical role in calcium homeostasis. Hormonal 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25D) signals through the nuclear vitamin D receptor, and large-scale expression profiling has provided numerous insights into its diverse physiological roles. To obtain a comprehensive picture of vitamin D signaling, we analyzed raw data from 94 (80 human, 14 mouse) expression profiles of genes regulated by 1,25D or its analogs. This identified several thousand distinct genes directly or indirectly up- or downregulated in a highly cell-specific manner in human cells using a 1.5-fold cut-off. There was significant overlap of biological processes regulated in human and mouse but minimal intersection between genes regulated in each species. Disease ontology clustering confirmed roles for 1,25D in immune homeostasis in several human cell types, and analysis of canonical pathways revealed novel and cell-specific roles of vitamin D in innate immunity. This included cell-specific regulation of several components of Nucleotide-binding Oligomerization Domain-like (NOD-like) pattern recognition receptor signaling, and metabolic events controlling innate immune responses. Notably, 1,25D selectively enhanced catabolism of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) in monocytic cells. BCAA levels regulate the major metabolic kinase mammalian Target of Rapamycin (mTOR), and pretreatment with 1,25D suppressed BCAA-dependent activation of mTOR signaling. Furthermore, ablation of BCAT1 expression in monocytic cells blocked 1,25D-induced increases in autophagy marker LAMP1. In conclusion, the data generated represents a powerful tool to further understand the diverse physiological roles of vitamin D signaling and provides multiple insights into mechanisms of innate immune regulation by 1,25D.

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Dobbs ◽  
Paula Embury ◽  
Emmily Koech ◽  
Sidney Ogolla ◽  
Stephen Munga ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Age-related changes in adaptive and innate immune cells have been associated with a decline in effective immunity and chronic, low-grade inflammation. Epigenetic, transcriptional, and functional changes in monocytes occur with aging, though most studies to date have focused on differences between young adults and the elderly in populations with European ancestry; few data exist regarding changes that occur in circulating monocytes during the first few decades of life or in African populations. We analyzed DNA methylation profiles, cytokine production, and inflammatory gene expression profiles in monocytes from young adults and children from western Kenya. Results We identified several hypo- and hyper-methylated CpG sites in monocytes from Kenyan young adults vs. children that replicated findings in the current literature of differential DNA methylation in monocytes from elderly persons vs. young adults across diverse populations. Differentially methylated CpG sites were also noted in gene regions important to inflammation and innate immune responses. Monocytes from Kenyan young adults vs. children displayed increased production of IL-8, IL-10, and IL-12p70 in response to TLR4 and TLR2/1 stimulation as well as distinct inflammatory gene expression profiles. Conclusions These findings complement previous reports of age-related methylation changes in isolated monocytes and provide novel insights into the role of age-associated changes in innate immune functions.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanan Ren ◽  
Ting-You Wang ◽  
Leah C. Anderton ◽  
Qi Cao ◽  
Rendong Yang

Abstract Background Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a growing focus in cancer research. Deciphering pathways influenced by lncRNAs is important to understand their role in cancer. Although knock-down or overexpression of lncRNAs followed by gene expression profiling in cancer cell lines are established approaches to address this problem, these experimental data are not available for a majority of the annotated lncRNAs. Results As a surrogate, we present lncGSEA, a convenient tool to predict the lncRNA associated pathways through Gene Set Enrichment Analysis of gene expression profiles from large-scale cancer patient samples. We demonstrate that lncGSEA is able to recapitulate lncRNA associated pathways supported by literature and experimental validations in multiple cancer types. Conclusions LncGSEA allows researchers to infer lncRNA regulatory pathways directly from clinical samples in oncology. LncGSEA is written in R, and is freely accessible at https://github.com/ylab-hi/lncGSEA.


Neurology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 89 (16) ◽  
pp. 1676-1683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Shamir ◽  
Christine Klein ◽  
David Amar ◽  
Eva-Juliane Vollstedt ◽  
Michael Bonin ◽  
...  

Objective:To examine whether gene expression analysis of a large-scale Parkinson disease (PD) patient cohort produces a robust blood-based PD gene signature compared to previous studies that have used relatively small cohorts (≤220 samples).Methods:Whole-blood gene expression profiles were collected from a total of 523 individuals. After preprocessing, the data contained 486 gene profiles (n = 205 PD, n = 233 controls, n = 48 other neurodegenerative diseases) that were partitioned into training, validation, and independent test cohorts to identify and validate a gene signature. Batch-effect reduction and cross-validation were performed to ensure signature reliability. Finally, functional and pathway enrichment analyses were applied to the signature to identify PD-associated gene networks.Results:A gene signature of 100 probes that mapped to 87 genes, corresponding to 64 upregulated and 23 downregulated genes differentiating between patients with idiopathic PD and controls, was identified with the training cohort and successfully replicated in both an independent validation cohort (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.79, p = 7.13E–6) and a subsequent independent test cohort (AUC = 0.74, p = 4.2E–4). Network analysis of the signature revealed gene enrichment in pathways, including metabolism, oxidation, and ubiquitination/proteasomal activity, and misregulation of mitochondria-localized genes, including downregulation of COX4I1, ATP5A1, and VDAC3.Conclusions:We present a large-scale study of PD gene expression profiling. This work identifies a reliable blood-based PD signature and highlights the importance of large-scale patient cohorts in developing potential PD biomarkers.


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Teng ◽  
Laiwan Chan

SummaryTraditional analysis of gene expression profiles use clustering to find groups of coexpressed genes which have similar expression patterns. However clustering is time consuming and could be diffcult for very large scale dataset. We proposed the idea of Discovering Distinct Patterns (DDP) in gene expression profiles. Since patterns showing by the gene expressions reveal their regulate mechanisms. It is significant to find all different patterns existing in the dataset when there is little prior knowledge. It is also a helpful start before taking on further analysis. We propose an algorithm for DDP by iteratively picking out pairs of gene expression patterns which have the largest dissimilarities. This method can also be used as preprocessing to initialize centers for clustering methods, like K-means. Experiments on both synthetic dataset and real gene expression datasets show our method is very effective in finding distinct patterns which have gene functional significance and is also effcient.


2005 ◽  
Vol 289 (4) ◽  
pp. L545-L553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Zabner ◽  
Todd E. Scheetz ◽  
Hakeem G. Almabrazi ◽  
Thomas L. Casavant ◽  
Jian Huang ◽  
...  

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is caused by mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), an epithelial chloride channel regulated by phosphorylation. Most of the disease-associated morbidity is the consequence of chronic lung infection with progressive tissue destruction. As an approach to investigate the cellular effects of CFTR mutations, we used large-scale microarray hybridization to contrast the gene expression profiles of well-differentiated primary cultures of human CF and non-CF airway epithelia grown under resting culture conditions. We surveyed the expression profiles for 10 non-CF and 10 ΔF508 homozygote samples. Of the 22,283 genes represented on the Affymetrix U133A GeneChip, we found evidence of significant changes in expression in 24 genes by two-sample t-test ( P < 0.00001). A second, three-filter method of comparative analysis found no significant differences between the groups. The levels of CFTR mRNA were comparable in both groups. There were no significant differences in the gene expression patterns between male and female CF specimens. There were 18 genes with significant increases and 6 genes with decreases in CF relative to non-CF samples. Although the function of many of the differentially expressed genes is unknown, one transcript that was elevated in CF, the KCl cotransporter (KCC4), is a candidate for further study. Overall, the results indicate that CFTR dysfunction has little direct impact on airway epithelial gene expression in samples grown under these conditions.


Author(s):  
Gustavo Deco ◽  
Kevin Aquino ◽  
Aurina Arnatkevičiūtė ◽  
Stuart Oldham ◽  
Kristina Sabaroedin ◽  
...  

AbstractBrain regions vary in their molecular and cellular composition, but how this heterogeneity shapes neuronal dynamics is unclear. Here, we investigate the dynamical consequences of regional heterogeneity using a biophysical model of whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dynamics in humans. We show that models in which transcriptional variations in excitatory and inhibitory receptor (E:I) gene expression constrain regional heterogeneity more accurately reproduce the spatiotemporal structure of empirical functional connectivity estimates than do models constrained by global gene expression profiles and MRI-derived estimates of myeloarchitecture. We further show that regional heterogeneity is essential for yielding both ignition-like dynamics, which are thought to support conscious processing, and a wide variance of regional activity timescales, which supports a broad dynamical range. We thus identify a key role for E:I heterogeneity in generating complex neuronal dynamics and demonstrate the viability of using transcriptional data to constrain models of large-scale brain function.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengying Sun ◽  
Rama Shankar ◽  
Meehyun Ko ◽  
Christopher Daniel Chang ◽  
Shan-Ju Yeh ◽  
...  

Abstract Epidemiological studies suggest that men exhibit a higher mortality rate to COVID-19 than women, yet the underlying biology is largely unknown. Here, we seek to delineate sex differences in the gene expression of viral entry proteins ACE2 and TMPRSS2, and host transcriptional responses to SARS-CoV-2 through large-scale analysis of genomic and clinical data. We first compiled 220,000 human gene expression profiles from three databases and completed the meta-information through machine learning and manual annotation. Large scale analysis of these profiles indicated that male samples show higher expression levels of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 than female samples, especially in the older group (>60 years) and in the kidney. Subsequent analysis of 6,031 COVID-19 patients at Mount Sinai Health System revealed that men have significantly higher creatinine levels, an indicator of impaired kidney function. Further analysis of 782 COVID-19 patient gene expression profiles taken from upper airway and blood suggested men and women present distinct expression changes. Computational deconvolution analysis of these profiles revealed male COVID-19 patients have enriched kidney-specific mesangial cells in blood compared to healthy patients. Together, this study suggests biological differences in the kidney between sexes may contribute to sex disparity in COVID-19.


Nature ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 588 (7838) ◽  
pp. 466-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Litviňuková ◽  
Carlos Talavera-López ◽  
Henrike Maatz ◽  
Daniel Reichart ◽  
Catherine L. Worth ◽  
...  

AbstractCardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Advanced insights into disease mechanisms and therapeutic strategies require a deeper understanding of the molecular processes involved in the healthy heart. Knowledge of the full repertoire of cardiac cells and their gene expression profiles is a fundamental first step in this endeavour. Here, using state-of-the-art analyses of large-scale single-cell and single-nucleus transcriptomes, we characterize six anatomical adult heart regions. Our results highlight the cellular heterogeneity of cardiomyocytes, pericytes and fibroblasts, and reveal distinct atrial and ventricular subsets of cells with diverse developmental origins and specialized properties. We define the complexity of the cardiac vasculature and its changes along the arterio-venous axis. In the immune compartment, we identify cardiac-resident macrophages with inflammatory and protective transcriptional signatures. Furthermore, analyses of cell-to-cell interactions highlight different networks of macrophages, fibroblasts and cardiomyocytes between atria and ventricles that are distinct from those of skeletal muscle. Our human cardiac cell atlas improves our understanding of the human heart and provides a valuable reference for future studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrie O’Rourke ◽  
Sinem Beyhan ◽  
Yongwook Choi ◽  
Pavel Morales ◽  
Agnes P. Chan ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an ever-growing public health problem worldwide. The low rate of antibiotic discovery coupled with the rapid spread of drug-resistant bacterial pathogens is causing a global health crisis. To facilitate the drug discovery processes, we present a large-scale study of reference antibiotic challenge bacterial transcriptome profiles, which included 37 antibiotics across 6 mechanisms of actions (MOAs) and provide an economical approach to aid in antimicrobial dereplication in the discovery process. We demonstrate that classical MOAs can be sorted based upon the magnitude of gene expression profiles despite some overlap in the secondary effects of antibiotic exposures across MOAs. Additionally, using gene subsets, we were able to subdivide broad MOA classes into subMOAs. Furthermore, we provide a biomarker gene set that can be used to classify most antimicrobial challenges according to their canonical MOA. We also demonstrate the ability of this rapid MOA diagnostic tool to predict and classify the expression profiles of pure compounds and crude extracts to their expression profile-associated MOA class.


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