The effect of upper-respiratory infection on transcriptomic changes in the CNS

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine the effect of an upper-respiratory infection on changes in RNA transcription occuring in the cerebellum and spinal cord. post infection. Methods: Gender matched eight week old C57BL/6 mice were inoculated saline or with Influenza A (Puerto Rico/8/34; PR8, 1.0 HAU) by intranasal route and transcriptomic changes in the cerebellum and spinal cord tissues were evaluated by RNA-seq (100bp paired end reads) at days 0 (non-infected), 4 and 8 Results: After trimming and excluding multi-mappeing reads an average of 92.07% (cerebellum) and 91.71% (spinal cord) of genes were uniquely mapped to a gene. The average number of single end reads per sample was 36.42 and 37 million for the spinal cord and cerebellum respectively. Infection caused significant changes to the transcriptome of each tissue, which was most prominent at day 8 post infection. Conclusion: This study represents the first to use RNA-seq tecnology to evaluate the effect of peripheral influenza a infection on changes in gene expression of the cerebellum and spinal cord. Gender matched eight week old C57BL/6 mice were inoculated saline or with Influenza A (Puerto Rico/8/34; PR8, 1.0 HAU) by intranasal route and transcriptomic changes in the cerebellum and spinal cord tissues were evaluated by RNA-seq (100bp paired end reads) at days 0 (non-infected), 4 and 8