Analysis of differentially expressed genes of Staphylococcus aureus isolated from corneal ulcer and healthy conjunctival sac / 中华实验眼科杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective@#To investigate the possible pathogenesis of Staphylococcus aureus (S.aureus) corneal ulcer by analyzing the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of S.aureus isolated from the patients with corneal ulcer and healthy conjunctival sac.@*Methods@#Ten strains of S.aureus isolates were obtained from January to August 2018 in the clinical laboratory of Qingdao Eye Hospital.Five strains of S.aureus isolated from patients with corneal ulcer and five strains of S.aureus isolated from healthy conjunctival sac were included.The gene expression profiles of 10 strains of S.aureus were sequenced by Illumina high-throughput RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq). P≤0.05 and fold change≥2 were used as the threshold to determine the statistically DEGs.Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analyses were used to determine the biological functions of DEGs.@*Results@#The genome-wide transcriptional analysis demonstrated that 270 genes were differentially expressed with 138 upregulated genes and 132 downregulated genes in the strains from corneal ulcer.Function analysis of DEGs revealed that genes encoding alpha hemolysin, delta hemolysin, virulence factor EsxA and LysR family transcriptional regulators were significantly upregulated in strains isolated from cornea ulcer.GO enrichment analysis showed that most DEGs was involved in the metabolic process with the biosynthesis, the most significantly related process was the metabolism of inosine monophosphate.The KEGG pathways suggested that a number of metabolic pathways had significant changes, such as S.aureus infection, two-component system and pyruvate metabolism, purine metabolism, which were critical to the pathogenesis of S.aureus corneal ulcer.@*Conclusions@#Identification of the DEGs between corneal ulcer isolates and healthy conjunctival isolates of S.aureus is helpful for further investigations on genes or pathways associated with the pathogenesis and therapeutic targets of S.aureus corneal ulcer.