In vivo differentially-expressed genes in Peromyscus leucopus, Mus musculus, and Rattus norvegicus blood in response to LPS

Animals that are competent reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens commonly
suffer little morbidity or apparent pathology from the infections. To
investigate mechanisms of this tolerance of infection, we used single-dose
lipopolysaccharide (LPS) as an experimental model of inflammation and
compared the four hour post-injection responses by three rodents: the
cricetine rodent Peromyscus leucopus (LL stock), the white-footed
deermouse and reservoir for agents of Lyme disease and other zoonoses, and
the murids Mus musculus (outbred CD-1 breed), the house mouse, and Rattus
norvegicus, the brown rat (Fischer strain). The data presented here are
part of a follow-up study of this phenomenon that was previoiusly reported
with the title "An Infection-Tolerant Mammalian Reservoir for Several
Zoonotic Agents Broadly Counters the Inflammatory Effects of
Endotoxin" (https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00588-21). The project and
the description of the samples are described under the following NCBI
BioProjects:PRJNA975149
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA975149) for mouse
and deermouse and PRJNA973677
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA973677). The manuscript
associated with the accompanying data of this follow-up study is in
preparation. The basic experimental design (described below) is the same
as for the prior study: a genome-wide RNA-seq of whole blood using
reference transcript set and then an analysis for differential gene
expression (DEG) between LPS-treated animals and controls for each of the
species. The accompanying dataset comprises the DEGs for deermice, mice,
and rats in this study. There were multiple differences in the rankings of
the DEGs by lowest p value between species with the greatest number of
differences between P. leucopus, which is in the familly Cricetidae, and
the mice and rats, which are in the family Muridae. Overall, the deermice
in the study displayed a greater anti-inflammatory response than the mice
and rats in the study. An example was interferon-gamma (Ifng) which was
one of the top ranked DEGs for the mice and rats but not for the deermice.