Lyme disease is challenging to diagnose, as clinical manifestations are variable and current tools to detect nucleic acid or antibody responses from Borrelia burgdorferi infection have low sensitivity.  Here we conducted the first study of the global transcriptome of patients with Lyme disease to identify potential diagnostic biomarkers.  Twenty-nine patients were enrolled and compared to 13 healthy controls at three time points after infection.  Fifteen publicly available transcriptome datasets from patients in vivo or infection models in vitro were used to assess specificity of differentially expressed genes (DEGs).  We found that Lyme disease results in profound and sustained changes in the patient transcriptomes, with a specific signature that shares 44% DEGs with other infections. SOURCE: Charles Chiu (charles.chiu@ucsf.edu) - Chiu Laboratory University of California, San Francisco

Pluto Bioinformatics

GSE63085: Identification of a Molecular Signature for Acute Lyme Disease by Human Transcriptome Profiling