Down regulation of Monocyte miRNAs: Implications for Immune Dysfunction and Disease Severity in Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

Monocyte miRNAs govern both protective and pathological responses during tuberculosis through their differential expression and emerged as potent target for biomarker discovery and host-directed therapeutics. Thus, our profound interest is to look at the miRNA profile of sorted monocytes across TB disease spectrum (drug-resistance TB (DR-TB), drug-sensitive TB (DS-TB) and latent TB) and healthy individuals (HC) to understand the underlying pathophysiology and their regulatory mechanism. Blood sample from four categories; 1. Healthy controls (HC) (n=6), 2. Latent TB (LTB) (n=6), 3. Drug-sensitive pulmonary tuberculosis (DS-TB) (n=6) and 4. Drug-resistant pulmonary tuberculosis (DR-TB) (n=6) were collected. After nCounter miRNA assay, QC metrics were performed using nSolver 4.0 software as per the guidelines, before proceeding with further analysis. 2 samples each from the groups, HC and DR-TB were filtered from further analysis before proceeding with normalization owing to the poor ligation QC values below the threshold. The final number of samples used for normalization and further analysis included 20 samples.