Blood transcriptional profiles discriminates cerebral and mild malaria patient living in Senegal

PBMCs were obtain from mild malaria and cerebral malaria patient at the onset of P. falciparum infection. Patient recruitment took place in two hospital centers in Senegal Total RNAs from PBMCs of mild and cerebral malaria patients were profiled after hybridization with Agilent SurePrint G3 Human GE 8x60K Microarray to identify blood biomarkers for cerebral malaria phenotype Plasmodium falciparum malaria remains a major health problem in Africa. The mechanisms of pathogenesis leading to the severe form of the disease are not fully understood. Blood transcriptional profiles were investigated in patient with cerebral malaria, noncerebral malaria , and mild malaria by using the microarray technology. We identified a set of 447 genes that was differentially expressed between the three patient groups after a false discovery rate of 10%. Since the cerebral patients displayed a particular transcriptional pattern, we focused our analysis on the differences between cerebral malaria patients and mild malaria patients. We further found 849 genes differentially expressed after a false discovery rate of 10%. We validated our results by using the qPCR method for 5 genes. The enrichment analysis of their functional annotation indicates that genes involved in A, B, C pathways play a role in the occurrence of cerebral malaria. These results provide new insight into the potential effect of the dysregulation of gene expression and specific pathways. Host genetic variation may partly explain such alteration of gene expression. Further studies are required to investigate this in African populations. Total RNAs was extracted from PBMCs of 16 patients including 6 mild malaria and 6 cerebral malaria