Identification of Common Biological Pathways and Drug Targets Across Multiple Respiratory Viruses Based on Human Host Gene Expression Analysis

Smith, Steven B.; Dampier, William; Tozeren, Aydin; Brown, James R.; Magid-Slav, Michal

We performed a large-scale analysis of published mRNA microarray datasets from studies involving a wide range of respiratory viruses in human host infection models. We focused on human mRNA array datasets in order to avoid complications inherent in cross-species comparisons. In order to ensure consistency in experimental conditions and reduce biases due to noisy or poor quality datasets, we instituted an iterative process of database querying, data filtering, and common pathway analysis across all published human mRNA datasets for twelve relevant respiratory viruses. These viruses initially included the double stranded DNA viruses Herpesviridae Human cytomegalovirus (CMV) and ADENO; the positive sense single stranded RNA viruses CORON, Picornaviridae Coxsackievirus (COX), HRV, Picornaviridae Echovirus (ECHO), and Picornaviridae Enterovirus (ENTERO); and the negative sense single stranded RNA viruses FLU, MPENU, RSV, Bunyaviridae Hantavirus (HANT) and Sin nombre virus (SNV). This list was later narrowed to include only the subset listed in Table 1 based on filtering processes outlined in the Materials and Methods and shown in Figure 1 .