Comparative transcriptomic analysis between an artificially induced SIRS in healthy individuals and spontaneous sepsis

Abstract

Sepsis is defined as a syndrome combining a systemic inflammatory response with a documented infection. It may progress to more serious cases such as septic shock following the failure of one or more organs and the emergence of hemodynamic defects. Assuming that the emergence of serious septic syndromes may be partially explained by the early loss of regulation of the inflammatory response, we decided to compare, in a transcriptomic perspective, the biological mechanisms expressed during an induced systemic inflammatory response with those expressed during severe septic syndromes. By using open-access transcriptomic databases, we first studied the kinetics of an induced inflammatory response. The use of functional analysis helped us identify discriminating biological mechanisms, such as the mTOR signaling pathway, between the pathological cases of sepsis and non-pathological (i.e., the artificially induced SIRS) cases.