Ciliary genes are down-regulated in bronchial tissue of primary ciliary dyskinesia patients

PLoS One. 2014 Feb 6;9(2):e88216. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088216. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare, genetically heterogeneous disease characterized by recurrent respiratory tract infections, sinusitis, bronchiectasis and male infertility. The pulmonary phenotype in PCD is caused by the impaired motility of cilia in the respiratory epithelium, due to ultrastructural defects of these organelles. We hypothesized that defects of multi-protein ciliary complexes should be reflected by gene expression changes in the respiratory epithelium. We have previously found that large group of genes functionally related to cilia share highly correlated expression pattern in PCD bronchial tissue. Here we performed an explorative analysis of differential gene expression in the bronchial tissue from six PCD patients and nine non-PCD controls, using Illumina HumanRef-12 Whole Genome BeadChips. We observed 1323 genes with at least 2-fold difference in the mean expression level between the two groups (t-test p-value <0.05). Annotation analysis showed that the genes down-regulated in PCD biopsies (602) were significantly enriched for terms related to cilia, whereas the up-regulated genes (721) were significantly enriched for terms related to cell cycle and mitosis. We assembled a list of human genes predicted to encode ciliary proteins, components of outer dynein arms, inner dynein arms, radial spokes, and intraflagellar transport proteins. A significant down-regulation of the expression of genes from all the four groups was observed in PCD, compared to non-PCD biopsies. Our data suggest that a coordinated down-regulation of the ciliome genes plays an important role in the molecular pathomechanism of PCD.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Bronchi / pathology*
  • Case-Control Studies
  • Cilia / genetics*
  • Cilia / pathology*
  • Down-Regulation / genetics*
  • Gene Expression Profiling
  • Genome, Human / genetics
  • Humans
  • Kartagener Syndrome / genetics*
  • Kartagener Syndrome / pathology
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation
  • Mutation / genetics
  • Up-Regulation / genetics

Grants and funding

This work was covered in part by the grant NN401 095537 from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland and by the grant BESTCILIA [305404, Better Experimental Screening and Treatment for Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (7FP, HEALTH.2012.2.4.4-2)]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.