Human-Leishmania skin lesion transcriptome

The goal of this study is to simultaneously examine host and parasite gene expression programs in skin lesions of human patients infected with the intracellular parasite Leishmania. We conducted high-resolution sequencing of the transcriptomes from early and late stage cutaneous leishmaniasis biopsies using an RNA-seq approach. An array of computational tools was applied to map reads to the Leishmania and human genomes and reconstruct full-length transcripts. mRNA abundance was determined for Leishmania and human genes, helping to explain tuning of the immune response to parasite transcriptomic profiles present in the lesion microenvironment. This data provided a deeper look at the transcriptomic profile of the host response in conjunction with a novel look at the parasite transcriptome in human cutaneous lesions. These data also offer the first glimpse of Leishmania gene expression profiles specific to the cutaneous manifestation of disease in human patients. This metatranscriptomic study provides a solid framework for future functional, genomic, and clinical studies of leishmaniasis as well as intracellular pathogenesis in general.