Whole transcriptome analysis of critically ill elderly patients with sepsis

Sepsis is a frequent complication in critically ill patients and highly heterogeneous that is associated with high morbidity and mortality rates, especially in the elderly population. Utilizing RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) to analysis biological pathways is widely used in clinical and molecular genetics studies, but in elderly patients with sepsis are still lacking. Hence, we aim to investigate the mortality-relevant biological features and transcriptomic features in elderly patients who were admitted to intensive care unit (ICU) for sepsis. We enrolled 37 elderly patients with sepsis at a tertiary referral hospital in central Taiwan. Blood samples and clinical/laboratory data were collected on day-1 and day-8 for RNA-Seq analysis. We implemented the DVID enrichment analysis and Gene Set Enrichment Analysis to identify the dynamic transcriptome and enriched pathway of day-8/day-1 differentially expressed genes, respectively. Finally, we utilized the MiXCR to analyze the diversity of T cell repertoire.