Project description:Epigenetic alternations in addition to genetic factors are important contributors to the pathogenesis of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE). Recent studies revealed that aberrant changes in DNA methylation occur in SLE patients, and potentially contributes to the pathogenesis. Using genome-wide DNA methylation microarray, the Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip, we compared the DNA methylation level of white blood cells between Chinese female SLE patients with that of healthy controls. There was no difference in global levels of DNA methylation between SLE patients and controls. However, we identified 36 CpG sites with differential loss of DNA methylation and 8 CpG sites with differential gain of DNA methylation, representing 26 genes and 7 genes respectively. Surprisingly, nearly half of the hypomethylated CpG sites were located in the CpG shores, which implicated the functional importance of loss of DNA methylation in the CpG shores in SLE.
Project description:Post-translational modifications (PTMs) are considered to be an important factor in the pathogenesis of SLE. Lysine 2-hydroxyisobutyryl (Khib), as an emerging post-translational modification of proteins, is involved in some important biological metabolic activities. We compared the Khib levels of SLE patients and healthy controls based on liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, and then performed proteomic analysis. The results showed that Khib in SLE patients was up-regulated at 865 sites of 416 proteins and down-regulated at 630 sites of 349 proteins. The site abundance, distribution and function of Khib protein were further analyzed. Bioinformatics analysis showed that complement, coagulation cascade and platelet activation in immune-related pathways were significantly enriched, indicating that the differential modification proteins between them might affect SLE.
Project description:Background: Patients with paediatric-onset systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) often present with more severe clinical courses than adult-onset patients. Although genome-wide DNA methylation (DNAm) profiling has been performed in adult-onset SLE patients, parallel data on paediatric-onset SLE are not available. Therefore, we undertook a genome-wide DNAm study in paediatric-onset SLE patients across multiple blood cell lineages. Methods: The DNAm profiles of four purified immune cell lineages were compared in 16 Chinese patients with paediatric-onset SLE and 13 healthy controls using the Illumina HumanMethylationEPIC BeadChip. The DNAm dataset consisted of 145 samples, including data from CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, B cells, neutrophils and whole blood. Results: Genome-wide DNAm analysis revealed considerable variation in DNAm levels across samples, and as expected, clustering occurred by cell type rather than disease status. Comparison of DNAm in whole blood and within each independent cell lineage identified a consistent pattern of loss of DNAm at 21 CpG sites overlapping 15 genes, which represented a robust, disease-specific DNAm signature for paediatric-onset SLE in our cohort. This DNAm signature shows considerable overlap with that identified in our adult-onset SLE patient cohort, predominantly showing a loss of DNAm and enrichment in genes involved in type I interferon signalling in SLE, regardless of the age of onset. In addition, cell lineage-specific changes, involving both loss and gain of DNAm, were observed in both novel genes and genes with well-described roles in SLE pathogenesis. Conclusion: The SLE-specific DNAm signature has the potential to develop into a diagnostic biomarker for SLE, which is particularly important for paediatric-onset patients, as diagnosing SLE in children can be challenging. This study also highlights the importance of studying DNAm changes in different immune cell lineages rather than only whole blood, since cell type-specific DNAm changes facilitated the elucidation of the cell type-specific molecular pathophysiology of SLE.
Project description:Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease characterized by abnormal immune responses that include aberrant activation of autoreactive T and B lymphocytes, with subsequent production of pathogenic autoantibodies and formation of immune complexes leading to organ injury. Pulmonary involvement in SLE is common and protean with different clinical manifestations ranging from acute pneumonitis, pulmonary hemorrhage to pulmonary fibrosis (PF). The health status of SLE patients with pulmonary disease is relatively poor, and the mortality rate is high, but research on SLE pulmonary domain is still lacking. In order to further explore the difference between SLE with PF and SLE without PF, we perform transcriptome sequencing analysis. The PBMCs from 3 SLE patients with PF and 3 SLE without PF were drawn, and RNA-seq was performed with subsequent bioinformatics analysis. Compared with the SLE patients without PF, the genes that changed in all three SLE patients with PF included 647 significantly up-regulated and 1364 significantly down-regulated differentially expressed genes.
Project description:Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a complex autoimmune disease with heterogeneous clinical manifestations and the pathogenesis of SLE is still unclear. Various omics results have been reported for SLE, but the molecular hallmarks of SLE, especially in patients with different disease activity, using an integrated multi-omics approach have not been fully investigated. Here, we collected blood samples from 10 healthy controls (HCs) and 40 SLE patients with different clinical activity including inactive (IA), low activity (LA), and high activity (HA). Using an integrative analysis of proteomic, metabolomic and lipidomic profiles, we report the multi-omics landscape for SLE. The molecular changes suggest that both the complement system and the inflammatory response were activated in SLEs and were associated with disease activity. Additionally, activation of the immunoglobulin mediated immune response were observed in the LA stage of the disease, however this immune response was suppressed slightly in the HA stage. Finally, an imbalance in lipid metabolism, especially in sphingolipid metabolism, accompanied with dysregulated apolipoproteins were observed to contribute to the disease activity of SLE. The multi-omics data presented in this study and the characterization of peripheral blood from SLE patients may thus help provide important clues regarding the pathogenesis of SLE.
Project description:we analyzed the characteristics of the respiratory microbiome, which was collected from different sites and using different sampling methods.
Project description:Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease, and affects all parts of the human body. Genome-wide association studies have been employed to identify susceptibility genes of SLE. However, most of the SLE associated variants are located in the noncoding regions of the human genome.We characterized SLE risk variants in Chinese populations. One of the most significant validated SNP was located in a gene which we named SLEAR. We found SLEAR was enriched in the nucleus and could regulate apoptosis. Apoptosis is a highly regulated process. And misregulation of the process could lead to autoimmune diseases, especially SLE. Our results suggest that the SLEAR plays a key role in apoptosis regulation and is associated with SLE predisposition.
Project description:SLE patients are always with various disease manifestation. Various cytokines are pointed interacting and playing pathological roles in SLE although the etiopathology is still obscure. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effects of cytokine interactions in the immune response of SLE patients. Overexpressed interferon-inducible(IFI) genes were confirmed in peripheral blood from SLE patients. Using network-based analysis on the immune response-related genes, several networks including cytokines such as TNF and IFN-γ, or beta-estradiol(E2), were constructed. TNF-regulated genes were dominant in these networks but in vitro TNF stimulation on PBMCs showed no different responses in the expressions of these genes between SLE and healthy individuals. Co-stimulating experiments by TNF, IFN-γ, and E2 with IFN-α, revealed that TNF has repressive while IFN-γ essentially has synergistic effect with IFN-α on IFI gene expressions in vitro. E2 showed different effects on IFI gene expressions among 3 individuals.