Faculty Collaboration Database

Transcriptomic signatures of cellular and humoral immune responses in older adults after seasonal influenza vaccination identified by data-driven clustering. Sci Rep 2018 Jan 15;8(1):739

Date

01/18/2018

Pubmed ID

29335477

Pubmed Central ID

PMC5768803

DOI

10.1038/s41598-017-17735-x

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85040795492 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   21 Citations

Abstract

PBMC transcriptomes after influenza vaccination contain valuable information about factors affecting vaccine responses. However, distilling meaningful knowledge out of these complex datasets is often difficult and requires advanced data mining algorithms. We investigated the use of the data-driven Weighted Gene Correlation Network Analysis (WGCNA) gene clustering method to identify vaccine response-related genes in PBMC transcriptomic datasets collected from 138 healthy older adults (ages 50-74) before and after 2010-2011 seasonal trivalent influenza vaccination. WGCNA separated the 14,197 gene dataset into 15 gene clusters based on observed gene expression patterns across subjects. Eight clusters were strongly enriched for genes involved in specific immune cell types and processes, including B cells, T cells, monocytes, platelets, NK cells, cytotoxic T cells, and antiviral signaling. Examination of gene cluster membership identified signatures of cellular and humoral responses to seasonal influenza vaccination, as well as pre-existing cellular immunity. The results of this study illustrate the utility of this publically available analysis methodology and highlight genes previously associated with influenza vaccine responses (e.g., CAMK4, CD19), genes with functions not previously identified in vaccine responses (e.g., SPON2, MATK, CST7), and previously uncharacterized genes (e.g. CORO1C, C8orf83) likely related to influenza vaccine-induced immunity due to their expression patterns.

Author List

Voigt EA, Grill DE, Zimmermann MT, Simon WL, Ovsyannikova IG, Kennedy RB, Poland GA

Author

Michael T. Zimmermann PhD Director, Assistant Professor in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Aged
Computational Biology
Female
Gene Expression Profiling
Healthy Volunteers
Humans
Immunity, Cellular
Immunity, Humoral
Immunologic Factors
Influenza Vaccines
Male
Middle Aged