Employees of NOVEL collaborated in the publication of the article "RNAseq profiling of blood from patients with coronary artery disease: "Signature of a T cell imbalance" in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology Plus.
The investigation of regulatory T cell dysfunction in CAD is the focus of the article. Researchers have accurately analyzed the biggest sample of gene activity in CAD using cutting-edge sequencing and bioinformatics methods.
It has been demonstrated that transcripts connected to the immunological synapse (interaction) are particularly connected to CAD. T-cells and B-cells can communicate with diverse antigen-presenting and immunomodulatory cells at the immunological synapse, which is contact-dependent. Fibromodulin (FMOD; upregulated 2.8-fold in CAD) is one of the most differentially expressed genes and is known to be associated with atherosclerosis, cardiomyopathy, and iron-dependent programmed cell death.
Moreover, transcripts for proteins connected to the immunological synapse's formation and operation have been found. Nebulette is involved in the binding of actin and desmin for the operation of the cytoskeleton and vesicular movement (increases 2.4 times in CAD). Transcripts that were directly connected to T cell activity and the regulation of differentiation were present in the immunological synapses' signaling pathways. T-cell activation is mediated by butyrophilin, which is elevated 1.7-fold in coronary artery disease.
The paper demonstrates how alternative sequencing technologies (SeqLL and Illumnina) enable the identification of transcripts linked to alterations in T regulatory cells, but with distinctly distinct transcripts linked to CAD.
The full text of the article can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277297612300003X?via%3Dihub