ABSTRACT. Although the role of CD14 in mediating signals from Toll-like receptors to recognize Mycobacterium tuberculosis is known, how polymorphisms in this gene affect the susceptibility to develop tuberculosis are still not clear. We examined whether single nucleotide polymorphisms at positions -1145 and -159 in the promoter region of the CD14 gene are associated with tuberculosis in a Chinese Han population in a case-control study of 432 Chinese patients with tuberculosis and 404 ethnically matched healthy controls. Genotyping was performed to identify polymorphisms of the CD14 gene by PCR-DNA sequencing. Both the frequency of allele T in the C(-159)T polymorphism (odds ratio (OR) = 1.4; 95% confidence interval (95%CI) = 1.148-1.708) and allele G in the G(-1145)A polymorphism (OR = 1.512; 95%CI = 1.236-1.849) were significantly more frequent in cases than in controls. The frequencies of genotypes CC and CT in the C(-159)T polymorphism, as well as the frequencies of genotypes AA and AG, were lower in cases than in controls. Based on our results, we conclude that G(-1145)A and C(-159)T polymorphisms of CD14 are associated with decreased risk for the development of tuberculosis in the Chinese Han population.

Transcriptome analysis of Inner Mongolia Cashmere goat and Dazu black goat generated 38,772,947 and 38,771,668 clean pair end reads, respectively, which were assembled into 72,422 and 80,069 unigenes by Trinity, respectively. For Inner Mongolia Cashmere goat, 26,051 and 10,100 unigenes were assigned to gene ontology (GO) categories and clusters of orthologous groups, respectively. A total of 32,772 unigenes can comment to SWISS-Prot database, and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes Pathway database (KEGG) mapped 24,420 unigenes. While annotating the unigenes about Dazu black goats, we found 29,444(45.42%), 11,271 (38.28%), 36,910(56.94%) and 27,766 (42.83%) unigenes were assigned to GO database, COG database, SWISS-Prot database and KEGG database, respectively. In addition, we performed the bioinformatics analysis of gene expression profiling aimed at the ovarian transcriptome difference between Inner Mongolia Cashmere goat and Dazu black goat. We obtained a sequencing depth of over 5.5 million and 5.8 million tags. There were 1,133 DEGs between two species, of which 632 genes upregulated in the Dazu black goat and 501 genes downregulated compared with which in Inner Mongolia Cashmere goat. By annotating the 1,133 DEGs into KEGG database, we found 525 DEGs. And there were 68 DEGs annotated in metabolic pathways, 31 DEGs annotated in ribosome, 28 DEGs annotated in focal adhesion, 27 DEGs annotated in phagosome, 26 DEGs annotated in pathways in cancer, 25 DEGs annotated in ECM-receptor interaction, 23 DEGs annotated in protein digestion and absorption, 20 DEGs annotated in oxidative phosphorylation, 17 DEGs annotated in lysosome, and 16 DEGs annotated in cell adhesion molecules.

DOI 10.4238/vol9-3gmr771 ABSTRACT. Myeloid differentiation-2 (MD-2) is an essential component of the CD14-TLR4/MD-2 receptor complex involved in microbial cell wall component recognition during infection. Genetic variations in the MD-2 gene may influence human susceptibility to infectious diseases. To date, a predisposition of MD-2 gene variants to contract tuberculosis has not been reported. We investigated whether MD-2 gene polymorphisms were associated with the development of tuberculosis in a Chinese population. The six common polymorphisms (rs11465996, rs1809442, rs1809441, rs1809440, rs16938754, and rs7842342) within the MD-2 gene promoter region were all detected in 259 patients with tuberculosis and 276 healthy control subjects by DNA sequencing. None of the allelic frequencies, haplotype patterns or genotype distributions of the assayed polymorphisms was found to be significantly different between patients and controls (P> 0.05). We conclude that these gene variants in the MD-2 gene promoter region are not associated with tuberculosis, and apparently do not play a role in susceptibility to tuberculosis in the Chinese population