Transcriptional Profiling of Dysregulated lncRNAs in B cells Response to Active Tuberculosis

Role of lncRNAs in human adaptive immune response to active tuberculosis (TB) infection is largely unexplored. The objective of this study was to characterize lncRNA expression profile in primary human B cell response to active TB infection using mcroarray assay. Patients with active pulmonary TB (male/female=13:18) with a mean age of 42.1±15.5 yr (ATB group) were recruited from Weifang No. 2 People’s Hospital of Shandong Province, China. Diagnosis of active pulmonary TB was based on both sputum smear and culture positive or at least one sputum culture positive, as well as typical pulmonary TB clinical symptoms. Healthy subjects (male/female=15:20) with a mean age of 40.3±13.9 yr (control group) were enrolled from the staff of Weifang Medical University, were free of clinical symptoms of any infectious disease, and had no close contact of a TB patient. All involved subjects had no history of TB, diabetes, tumor or other infectious disease. Three samples randomly selected from each group (male/female=1:2,BT1,BT2 and BT3 for ATB group, CB1,CB2 and CB3 for controls) were used in the microarray assay and all of the samples were used for further RT-qPCR confirmation.