Simultaneous gene expression profiling in human macrophages infected with Leishmania major parasites using SAGE

Abstract

Background: Leishmania (L) are intracellular protozoan parasites that are able to survive and replicate within the harsh and potentially hostile phagolysosomal environment of mammalian mononuclear phagocytes. A complex interplay then takes place between the macrophage (MPhi) striving to eliminate the pathogen and the parasite struggling for its own survival. To investigate this host-parasite conflict at the transcriptional level, in the context of monocyte-derived human MPhis (MDM) infection by L. major metacyclic promastigotes, the quantitative technique of serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) was used.

Results: After extracting mRNA from resting human MPhis, Leishmania-infected human MPhis and L. major parasites, three SAGE libraries were constructed and sequenced generating up to 28,173; 57,514 and 33,906 tags respectively (corresponding to 12,946; 23,442 and 9,530 unique tags). Using computational data analysis and direct comparison to 357,888 publicly available experimental human tags, the parasite and the host cell transcriptomes were then simultaneously characterized from the mixed cellular extract, confidently discriminating host from parasite transcripts. This procedure led us to reliably assign 3,814 tags to MPhis' and 3,666 tags to L. major parasites transcripts. We focused on these, showing significant changes in their expression that are likely to be relevant to the pathogenesis of parasite infection: (i) human MPhis genes, belonging to key immune response proteins (e.g., IFNgamma pathway, S100 and chemokine families) and (ii) a group of Leishmania genes showing a preferential expression at the parasite's intra-cellular developing stage.

Conclusion: Dual SAGE transcriptome analysis provided a useful, powerful and accurate approach to discriminating genes of human or parasitic origin in Leishmania-infected human MPhis. The findings presented in this work suggest that the Leishmania parasite modulates key transcripts in human MPhis that may be beneficial for its establishment and survival. Furthermore, these results provide an overview of gene expression at two developmental stages of the parasite, namely metacyclic promastigotes and intracellular amastigotes and indicate a broad difference between their transcriptomic profiles. Finally, our reported set of expressed genes will be useful in future rounds of data mining and gene annotation.

Figure 1

Venn diagram comparing the parasite-infected MDM and L. major SAGE libraries with the MDM non-infected library or with other publicly available leukocyte libraries. This figure is not drawn to scale. All unique tags species detected within the "MDM+Lm" library were compared to unique tags from the Lm and MDM libraries (A), or from the Lm library and a collection of publicly available human leukocyte tags (B). Panels C and D show comparisons after withdrawing tags found only once (unless present twice in another library).

Figure 2

Comparison of gene expression modulation in the L. major-infected "MDM+Lm" library to MDM library. A semi-logarithmic plot shows that both up- and down-modulated tags were decreased within a bell-shaped curve except for a tail corresponding to tags upregulated 12 to 16 times. The relative expression of each transcript was determined by dividing the number of tags observed in the MDM library by the number of the same tags observed in the "MDM+Lm" library. To avoid division by 0, we used a tag value of 1 for any tag that was not detectable. These ratios are plotted on the abscissa. The number of tag species comprising each ratio is plotted on the ordinate.

Figure 3

Covariance Analysis of Gene expression profiles raised with the 500 most abundant tags (A) or with the next 2418 tags (B). This figure shows similarities of transcriptome profiles between different SAGE tag collections. "MDM+Lm" corresponds to MDM-specific genes extracted from the Leishmania-infected sample, MDM to the library built with the same MDM preparation and MDM-M to a second in-house library prepared independently with MDMs raised in similar conditions from another pool of donors (Ottones et al., unpublished data). Mono, LPS, GM-CSF, M-CSF, IDC, MADC, leuk, WBC-N and WBC-Bc correspond to publicly available SAGE libraries (see Methods' section).

Figure 4

Examples of gene transcripts categorized into functional classes involved in defense MΦ programs. This figure shows some gene transcripts related to defense pathways in human macrophages extracted from a list of down- or up-modulated transcripts after exposure to Leishmania infection and clustered into functional families (data not shown). Data are reported according to their scale of fold expression values ranging from – 10 (green color) to +10 (red color). For extended names of genes abbreviated see Additional file 5.