Blood Transcriptional Profiles in Human Active and Latent Tuberculosis-GSE19491

This series regroups different datasets (training set, test set, validation set, longitudinal set, separated cell set) to identify and characterise a specific transcriptional signature for patients with active TB, distinct from patients with latent TB and healthy controls.

Active Pulmonary TB: PTB - All patients were confirmed by isolation of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis on culture of sputum or bronchoalvelolar lavage fluid. Latent TB: LTB - All patients were screened at a tuberculosis clinic, being either new entrants to the UK from endemic countries or being household contacts of infectious cases, or in the case of the validation set recruited in South Africa, were residents of a high incidence country. All UK patients were positive by tuberculin skin test (>14mm if BCG vaccinated, >5mm if not vaccinated) and were also positive by Interferon-Gamma Release assay(IGRA); specifically Quantiferon Gold In-Tube Assay (Cellestis, Australia). The South African latent TB patients were all positive by Interferon-Gamma Release assay (IGRA); specifically Quantiferon Gold In-Tube Assay. Latent patients had no clinical, radiological or microbiological evidence of active infection and were asymptomatic. Healthy controls - these were volunteers without exposure to TB who were negative by both tuberculin skin test (<15mm if BCG vaccinated, <6mm if unvaccinated); and IGRA (as described above). Experimental variables : Patient group: Active PTB; Latent TB, Healthy controls (BCG vaccinated and unvaccinated). Ethnicity - a wide range of ethnic groups is represented. The active PTB group incorporates a range of smear positive and smear negative disease and a spectrum of disease extent/severity. Experimental methods: Whole blood was collected into Tempus tubes (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA) and stored between -20degrees Celsius and -80 degrees Celsius before RNA extraction. For the training set cohort, and the active TB patients baseline samples in the longitudinal cohort, total RNA was isolated from whole blood using the PerfectPure RNA Blood kit (5 PRIME Inc, Gaithersburg, MD, USA). For the separated cell samples, total RNA was isolated using the Qiagen RNeasy Mini Kit. For all other cohorts Total RNA was isolated from whole blood using the MagMAX 96 well RNA isolation kit (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA). Isolated total RNA was then globin reduced using the GLOBINclear 96-well format kit (Ambion, Austin, TX, USA) according to the manufacturer's instructions. Total and globin-reduced RNA integrity was assessed using an Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent, Palo Alto, CA). Biotinylated, amplified RNA targets (cRNA) were then prepared from the globin-reduced RNA using the Illumina CustomPrep RNA amplification kit (Ambion, Austin, TX, USA). Labeled cRNA was hybridized overnight to Sentrix HT12 V3 BeadChip arrays (>48,000 probes, Illumina Inc, San Diego, CA, USA), washed, blocked, stained and scanned on an Illumina BeadStation 500 following the manufacturer's protocols. Illumina's BeadStudio version 2 software was used to generate signal intensity values from the scans, substract background, and scale each microarray to the median average intensity for all samples (per-chip normalisation). This normalised data was used for all subsequent data analysis.