Human Airway Smooth Muscle Transcriptome Changes in Response to Asthma Medications

Rationale: Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disease. The most common medications used for its treatment are β2-agonists and glucocorticosteroids, and one of the primary tissues that these drugs target in the treatment of asthma is the airway smooth muscle. We used RNA-Seq to characterize the human airway smooth muscle (HASM) transcriptome at baseline and under three asthma treatment conditions. Methods: The Illumina TruSeq assay was used to prepare 75bp paired-end libraries for HASM cells from four white male donors under four treatment conditions: 1) no treatment; 2) treatment with a β2-agonist (i.e. Albuterol, 1μM for 18h); 3) treatment with a glucocorticosteroid (i.e. Dexamethasone (Dex), 1μM for 18h); 4) simultaneous treatment with a β2-agonist and glucocorticoid, and the libraries were sequenced with an Illumina Hi-Seq 2000 instrument. The Tuxedo Suite Tools were used to align reads to the hg19 reference genome, assemble transcripts, and perform differential expression analysis using the protocol described in https://github.com/blancahimes/taffeta mRNA profiles obtained via RNA-Seq for four primary human airway smooth muscle cell lines that were treated with dexamethasone, albuterol, dexamethasone+albuterol or were left untreated.