Whole transcriptome analysis of human macrophages infected with H5N1 and H1N1 influenza viruses reveals the significant up-regulation of RIG-I-like receptor signaling pathway [mRNA]

We generated an average of 868 million nucleotides and 30 folds coverage per sample. More than 76% of the sequencing reads were mapped to the human genome, and 45.5% of the annotated reference genes were mapped by at least 10 reads. Differential expression quantification showed that H5N1 virus elicits greater changes in host gene expression than the H1N1 virus at nearly all three time points with 1198,273,and 620 up-regulated in H5N1, and 426,285, and 523 in H1N1 compared with mock control (fold-change >= 2.0, and p-value <= 0.05). Pathway over-representation analysis revealed that the up-regulated genes in H5N1 are significantly enriched by genes involved in RIG-I-like receptor signaling pathway at 6-hr post-infection. We studied the whole transcriptome of a highly pathogenic influenza virus H5N1 and a low virulent H1N1 in human monocyte-derived macrophages at 1-, 3-, and 6-hr post-infection to identify the molecular events leading to virus pathogenesis at early infection stages by comparing with the mock infected cells.