Fasciola hepatica Infection in Cattle: Analysing Responses of Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells (PBMC) Using a Transcriptomics Approach

Using RNA sequencing we investigated gene expression changes in PBMC isolated from 9 non-infected and 11 F. hepatica-experimentally-infected 3-6 month male-castrated calves. Animals were kept in-house under the same conditions during the experimental study. Blood samples were collected by jugular venopuncture at three different time-points: at the day of infection (W0), 1 week (W1) and 14 weeks (W14) post-infection. PBMC were isolated and total RNA was extracted using Qiagen kit. Sixty barcoded mRNA-seq libraries were prepared using a KAPA stranded mRNA-seq kit and KAPA Dual-Indexed Adapter Kit (Roche). Libraries were pooled in one sample. The pooled sample was loaded across 8 lanes of v4 chemistry high output paired-end (PE) flow cells at 2x125 nucleotide reads on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 Sequencing System.