Histone modifications underlie monocyte dysregulation in Systemic Sclerosis patients, underlining the treatment potential of epigenetic targeting [RNA-seq]

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a chronic autoimmune disease that mainly affects the connective tissue. Monocytes have been shown to be an important cell type involved in the pathogenesis of SSc. By performing RNA-sequencing analysis on whole RNA isolated from peripheral blood CD14+ monocytes obtained from SSc patients, together with healthy controls matched for sex and age, obtained from the University Medical Center Utrecht (definite SSc cohort), and the University of Milan (non-fibrotic SSc cohort), we aimed to characterize the transcriptomic landscape of monocytes of patients with (pre-clinical) systemic sclerosis. Moreover, ChIPseq data was available for a part of the subjects included in the RNA-seq analysis and the correlation between the histone marks and gene expression was studied. The samples used in this study are part of the SYSCLASS cohort. Transcriptomic profiling was performed for two SSc cohorts. For the definite SSc cohort (Utrecht) total RNA from 9 heathy controls and 25 SSc patients were subjected to RNA-seq analysis. For the non-fibrotic SSc cohort (Milan) total RNA from 9 heathy controls and 30 pre-clinical SSc patients were subjected to RNA-seq analysis.