Comparison of miRNA profile of uninfected and Leishmania donovani infected THP1 diffentiated macrophages.. Homo sapiens

Several intracellular pathogens target the host miRNA to modulate the expression of host proteins for their successful infection and survival. For example, S. typhimurium (Schulte et al., 2011) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Kumar et al., 2015) downregulate miRNAs of let-7 family to modulate immune response in host; H. pylori infection induces the expression of miR-155 to inhibit the release of IL-8 (Xiao et al., 2009); L. monocytogens triggers the expression of anti- inflammatory cytokine IFN-β by downregulation of miR-145 (Izar et al., 2012). Similarly, Leishmania infection also modulates the expression of various miRNA in macrophages (Lemaire et al., 2013). Consequently, it has been shown that L. donovani infection downregulates miR-122 expression which lowers serum cholesterol to facilitate infection (Ghosh et al., 2013). Whereas, Leishmania significantly enhances the miR30A- 3p expression and modulates autophagic pathway in macrophages (Singh et al., 2016). To understand how Leishmania modulate the expression of various genes in infected macrophages, we have compared the miRNA profile of uninfected and infected macrophages. Overall design: miRNA profiling of uninfected and Leishmania donovani infected THP1 differentiated macrophages after 15 h of infection was done to understand the mechanism of regulation of various genes.