Chikungunya-Driven Gene Expression Linked to Osteoclast Survival and Chronic Arthralgia.

Chikungunya fever (CHIKF), caused by the Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), manifests as acute febrile illness often associated with polyarthritis and polyarthralgia. Although the acute symptoms resolve within two weeks, many patients experience prolonged joint pain and inflammation, resembling rheumatoid arthritis (RA). This study aimed to identify molecular markers related to joint pain and chronicity in CHIKV-infected individuals by analyzing blood transcriptomes using bulk RNA sequencing.

Immunodominant antibody responses directed to SARS-CoV-2 hotspot mutation sites and risk of immune escape.

Introduction: Considering the likely need for the development of novel effective vaccines adapted to emerging relevant CoV-2 variants, the increasing knowledge of epitope recognition profile among convalescents and afterwards vaccinated with identification of immunodominant regions may provide important information.

Methods: We used an RBD peptide microarray to identify IgG and IgA binding regions in serum of 71 COVID-19 convalescents and 18 vaccinated individuals.

Results: We found a set of immunodominant RBD antibody epitopes, each recognized by more than 30% of the tested cohort, that differ among the two different groups and are within conserved regions among betacoronavirus.

Molecular alterations in human milk in simulated maternal nasal mucosal infection with live attenuated influenza vaccination.

Breastfeeding protects against mucosal infections in infants. The underlying mechanisms through which immunity develops in human milk following maternal infection with mucosal pathogens are not well understood. We simulated nasal mucosal influenza infection through live attenuated influenza vaccination (LAIV) and compared immune responses in milk to inactivated influenza vaccination (IIV).

Network vaccinology.

The structure and function of the immune system is governed by complex networks of interactions between cells and molecular components. Vaccination perturbs these networks, triggering specific pathways to induce cellular and humoral immunity. Systems vaccinology studies have generated vast data sets describing the genes related to vaccination, motivating the use of new approaches to identify patterns within the data.

The Protein-Protein Interaction Network Reveals a Novel Role of the Signal Transduction Protein PII in the Control of c-di-GMP Homeostasis in Azospirillum brasilense.

The PII family comprises a group of widely distributed signal transduction proteins ubiquitous in prokaryotes and in the chloroplasts of plants. PII proteins sense the levels of key metabolites ATP, ADP, and 2-oxoglutarate, which affect the PII protein structure and thereby the ability of PII to interact with a range of target proteins. Here, we performed multiple ligand fishing assays with the PII protein orthologue GlnZ from the plant growth-promoting nitrogen-fixing bacterium to identify 37 proteins that are likely to be part of the PII protein-protein interaction network.

Methods for predicting vaccine immunogenicity and reactogenicity.

Subjects receiving the same vaccine often show different levels of immune responses and some may even present adverse side effects to the vaccine. Systems vaccinology can combine omics data and machine learning techniques to obtain highly predictive signatures of vaccine immunogenicity and reactogenicity. Currently, several machine learning methods are already available to researchers with no background in bioinformatics.

Assessing the Impact of Sample Heterogeneity on Transcriptome Analysis of Human Diseases Using MDP Webtool.

Transcriptome analyses have increased our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying human diseases. Most approaches aim to identify significant genes by comparing their expression values between healthy subjects and a group of patients with a certain disease. Given that studies normally contain few samples, the heterogeneity among individuals caused by environmental factors or undetected illnesses can impact gene expression analyses.