Back

Genetic control of the transcriptional response to active tuberculosis disease and treatment

O'Grady, J. F.; Leonard, A. S.; Li, H.; Fang, L.; Pausch, H.; Gormley, I. C.; Gordon, S. V.; MacHugh, D. E.

2025-04-14 genetics
10.1101/2025.04.11.648383 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Understanding the functional impact of genomic sequence variants is critical for evaluating the role of genetic variation in the host response during tuberculosis (TB) disease and anti-TB treatment (ATT). Hitherto, there have been no genome-wide in vivo response expression quantitative trait loci (reQTL) studies conducted for active TB and ATT. Here, using longitudinal peripheral blood RNA-seq data from n = 48 patients with active TB who underwent ATT, we call sequence variants directly from these transcriptomes and impute them with a multi-ancestry reference panel. Associating our variants with the expression of nearby genes, we characterise thousands of cis-eQTL and hundreds of reQTL. We further show significant changes in cell type proportions during ATT through deconvolution of the bulk RNA-seq data and identify the putative cell type specific nature of cis-eQTL. Our work sheds light on the immunogenetics of TB disease and treatment, while providing a framework for studies using only RNA-seq data.

Published in Communications Medicine · training set

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.