Molecular Characterization of Transcriptome-wide Interactions between Highly Pathogenic Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus and Porcine Alveolar Macrophages in vivo

Zhou, Ping; Zhai, Shanli; Zhou, Xiang; Lin, Ping; Jiang, Tengfei; Hu, Xueying; Jiang, Yunbo; Wu, Bin; Zhang, Qingde; Xu, Xuewen; Li, Jin-ping; Liu, Bang

Genome-wide transcriptional responses of lungs of Landrace×Yorkshire crossbred piglets to a classical North American type PRRSV strain infection was analyzed by Solexa/Illumina's Digital Gene Expression (DGE) System, which is a tag-based high-throughput transcriptome sequencing method [6] . This systematic analysis of the pulmonary gene expression profiles suggested that upregulation expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines, chemokines, adhesion molecules and inflammatory enzymes and inflammatory cells, antibodies, complement activation were likely to result in the development of inflammatory responses during PRRSV infection processes [6] . Another high-throughput deep sequencing was performed focusing on the pulmonary gene expression profiles after a highly pathogenic-PRRSV (HP-PRRSV) strain infection [7] . The system analysis of the pulmonary gene expression provides a comprehensive basis for better understanding the pathogenesis of HP-PRRSV [7] . Because PRRSV infection occurs predominately in porcine alveolar macrophages (PAMs) [3] , the interaction between PRRSV and PAMs have been studied systematically by high-throughput research methods in vitro. PAMs, lavaged from six piglets, were challenged with the Lelystad PRRSV strain in vitro, and the gene expression of the PAMs was investigated using Affymetrix microarrays [8] . The result suggested that the expression of beta interferon 1 (IFN-β), but not of IFN-α, was strongly upregulated in the early stage of PRRSV infection [8] . Besides microarray, Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) was also employed to examine the global expression of genes in PRRSV-infected PAMs in vitro [9] . These studies have provided global gene expression profiles of lung tissue in vivo and PAMs in vitro following infection with PRRSV; however, transcriptome-wide understanding of the interaction between PRRSV and PAMs in vivo has not yet been established.