Expression data from primary human hepatocyte oxygenated co-cultures infected by HCV and human liver biopsies from HCV patients.

Viruses lack the basic machinery needed to replicate and therefore must hijack host metabolism to propagate. Virus-induced metabolic alterations have yet to be systematically studied in the context of the host transcriptional regulation, offering insight into host-pathogen metabolic interplay. In this work we identified Hepatitis C Virus (HCV)-responsive regulators by coupling system-wide metabolic flux analysis with targeted perturbation of nuclear receptors in primary human hepatocytes. We find HCV-induced up-regulation of glycolysis, ketogenesis and drug metabolism, controlled by activation of HNF4α, PPARα, FXR and PXR, respectively. Pharmaceutical inhibition of HNF4α reversed HCV-induced glycolysis, blocking viral replication while increasing apoptosis in infected cells showing a viral-induced dependence on glycolysis. In contrast, pharmaceutical inhibition of PPARα or FXR reversed HCV-induced ketogenesis, but increased viral replication demonstrating a unique host anti-viral response. Our results show that viral-induced changes to host metabolism can be detrimental to its lifecycle demonstrating a distinct biological complexity. In this dataset, we include the expression data obtained from primary human hepatocyte oxygenated co-cultures infected or not infected by HCV and human sanp frozen liver biopsys from HCV patients at earley stages. We compared the 4 naïve and HCV-infected primary hepatocytes samples, and compared the 5 human liver biopsy samples to 19 normal liver samples from GSE14323.