Transcriptome Analysis of Human Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells Exposed to Lassa Virus and to the Attenuated Mopeia/Lassa Reassortant 29 (ML29), a Vaccine Candidate

Zapata, Juan Carlos; Carrion, Ricardo; Patterson, Jean L.; Crasta, Oswald; Zhang, Yan; Mani, Sachin; Jett, Marti; Poonia, Bhawna; Djavani, Mahmoud; White, David M.; Lukashevich, Igor S.; Salvato, Maria S.

In this study, PBMC from three healthy donors were exposed to LASV or ML29 viruses at 1 MOI in duplicate and were collected at 4, 8, and 24 hours post-exposure (hpe) for isolation of total RNA. cDNA was hybridized to Affymetrix chips covering the whole human genome. Cluster and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showed that all samples clustered together by time (4, 8, and 24 hpe), by donor (3 healthy donors) and by treatment (unexposed, LASV-exposed, and ML29-exposed cells) ( Figure S1 ). Since donor variation exceeded treatment variation, pairwise Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM) was used to compare RNA samples before and after exposure for each donor at different time points. Differentially-expressed genes were defined as those that had at least a .2-fold changes with respect to media controls.