Messenger RNA biomarkers of Bovine Respiratory Syncytial Virus infection in the whole blood of dairy calves

作者：Dayle Johnston, Bernadette Earley, Matthew S. McCabe, Jae Woo Kim, Jeremy F. Taylor, Ken Lemon, Catherine Duffy, Michael McMenamy, S. Louise Cosby, Sinéad M. Waters · 发表于：Scientific Reports · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1038/s41598-021-88878-1 · 被引用次数：25 · 研究领域：Respiratory viral infections research、RNA modifications and cancer、Cancer-related molecular mechanisms research

Abstract Bovine Respiratory Syncytial Virus (BRSV) is a primary viral cause of Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) in young calves, which is responsible for substantial morbidity and mortality. Infection with BRSV induces global gene expression changes in respiratory tissues. If these changes are observed in tissues which are more accessible in live animals, such as whole blood, they may be used as biomarkers for diagnosis of the disease. Therefore, the objective of the current study was to elucidate the whole blood transcriptomic response of dairy calves to an experimental challenge with BRSV. Calves (Holstein–Friesian) were either administered BRSV inoculate (10 3.5 TCID 50 /ml × 15 ml) (n = 12) or sterile phosphate buffered saline (n = 6). Clinical signs were scored daily and whole blood was collected in Tempus RNA tubes immediately prior to euthanasia, at day 7 post-challenge. RNA was extracted from blood and sequenced (150 bp paired-end). The sequence reads were aligned to the bovine reference genome (UMD3.1) and EdgeR was subsequently employed for differential gene expression analysis. Multidimensional scaling showed that samples from BRSV challenged and control calves segregated based on whole blood gene expression changes, despite the BRSV challenged calves only displaying mild clinical symptoms of the disease. There were 281 differentially expressed (DE) genes ( p < 0.05, FDR < 0.1, fold change > 2) between the BRSV challenged and control calves. The top enrich...