Identification of a Molecular Signature for Acute Lyme Disease by Human Transcriptome Profiling

Lyme disease is challenging to diagnose, as clinical manifestations are variable and current tools to detect nucleic acid or antibody responses from Borrelia burgdorferi infection have low sensitivity. Here we conducted the first study of the global transcriptome of patients with Lyme disease to identify potential diagnostic biomarkers. Twenty-nine patients were enrolled and compared to 13 healthy controls at three time points after infection. Fifteen publicly available transcriptome datasets from patients in vivo or infection models in vitro were used to assess specificity of differentially expressed genes (DEGs). We found that Lyme disease results in profound and sustained changes in the patient transcriptomes, with a specific signature that shares =44% DEGs with other infections. Overall design: Gene expression profile from peripheral mononuclear blood cells (PBMC) of Lyme disease patients against healthy controls was undertaken. A total of 29 Lyme disease patients were sampled at 3 time points: acute Lyme pre-treatment (V1), 3 weeks later, immediately following completion of a standard course of antibiotics (V2), and 6 months following treatment completion (V5). 13 healthy controls were also sampled at one time point. Total RNA was extracted from 10e7 PBMC, followed by mRNA purification, paired-end barcode library preparation and sequencing on an Illumina Hiseq 2000.

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Bouquet J, Soloski MJ, Swei A, Cheadle C, Federman S, Billaud JN, Rebman AW, Kabre B, Halpert R, Boorgula M, Aucott JN, Chiu CY