Lack of inflammatory gene expression in bats: a unique role for a transcription repressor

Author

Arinjay Banerjee
Noreen Rapin
Trent Bollinger
Vikram Misra

Files

Publication Date

5-22-2017

Publication Title

Scientific Reports

Volume Number

7

Abstract

In recent years viruses similar to those that appear to cause no overt disease in bats have spilled-over to humans and other species causing serious disease. Since pathology in such diseases is often attributed to an over-active inflammatory response, we tested the hypothesis that bat cells respond to stimulation of their receptors for viral ligands with a strong antiviral response, but unlike in human cells, the inflammatory response is not overtly activated. We compared the response of human and bat cells to poly(I:C), a viral double-stranded RNA surrogate. We measured transcripts for several inflammatory, interferon and interferon stimulated genes using quantitative real-time PCR and observed that human and bat cells both, when stimulated with poly(I:C), contained higher levels of transcripts for interferon beta than unstimulated cells. In contrast, only human cells expressed robust amount of RNA for TNFα, a cell signaling protein involved in systemic inflammation. We examined the bat TNFα promoter and found a potential repressor (c-Rel) binding motif. We demonstrated that c-Rel binds to the putative c-Rel motif in the promoter and knocking down c-Rel transcripts significantly increased basal levels of TNFα transcripts. Our results suggest bats may have a unique mechanism to suppress inflammatory pathology.

Document Type

Article

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01513-w

Language

English

Recommended Citation

Banerjee, Arinjay; Rapin, Noreen; Bollinger, Trent; and Misra, Vikram, "Lack of inflammatory gene expression in bats: a unique role for a transcription repressor" (2017). KIP Articles. 9861.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/kip_articles/9861