Abstract
Coccidiosis, caused by various Eimeria species, is a major parasitic disease in chickens. Our understanding of how chickens respond to coccidian infections is highly limited at both the molecular and cellular levels. In this study, coexpression modules were identified by weighted gene coexpression network analysis in chickens infected with Eimeria tenella. A total of 15 correlation modules were identified using 5,175 genes with 24 chicken samples, 12 with primary and 12 with secondary E. tenella infection. The analysis of the interactions between these modules showed a high degree of scale independence. Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Gene and Genomes enrichment analyses revealed that genes in these functional modules were involved in a broad categories of functions, such as immune response, amino acid metabolism, cellular responses to lipids, sterol biosynthetic processes, and RNA transport. Two modules viz yellow and magenta were identified significantly associating with infection status. Preservation analysis showed that most of the modules identified in E. tenella infections were highly or moderately preserved in chickens infected with either Eimeria acervulina or Eimeria maxima. These analyses outline a biological responses landscape for chickens infected by E. tenella, and also indicates that infections with these three Eimeria species elicit similar biological responses in chickens at the system level. These findings provide new clues and ideas for investigating the relationship between parasites and host, and the control of parasitic diseases.
Highlights
Chickens are an important component of agricultural economy worldwide, as they serve as one of the primary sources of protein for humans
Kim et al compared the transcriptomes of the three species in chickens with primary and secondary infection and found that E. tenella elicited the most gene alterations in both primary and secondary infection, while few genes were differently expressed in primary infection and many genes were altered in secondary infection with E. acervulina and E. maxima
We constructed the weighted gene coexpression network (WGCN) on the microarray datasets of chickens infected by E. tenella, delineated the module functions, and examined the module preservation across E. acervulina or E. maxima infection, which is aiming to reveal the biological responses elicited by E. tenella infection and the conserved responses among chickens infected with different Eimeria species at a system level and shedding light on the mechanisms underlying the infection’s progression
Summary
Chickens are an important component of agricultural economy worldwide, as they serve as one of the primary sources of protein for humans. Pathway analysis demonstrated that the altered genes were involved in certain intracellular signaling pathways All their analyses were based on differentially expressed genes (DEGs) or single cytokines that were identified as isolates [6]. We constructed the weighted gene coexpression network (WGCN) on the microarray datasets of chickens infected by E. tenella, delineated the module functions, and examined the module preservation across E. acervulina or E. maxima infection, which is aiming to reveal the biological responses elicited by E. tenella infection and the conserved responses among chickens infected with different Eimeria species at a system level and shedding light on the mechanisms underlying the infection’s progression
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