Transcriptomic Analysis in Human Macrophages Infected with Therapeutic Failure Clinical Isolates of Leishmania infantum br

Leishmaniasis is one of the neglected tropical diseases with a worldwide distribution, affecting humans and animals. In the absence of an effective vaccine, current treatment is through the use of chemotherapy; however, existing treatments have frequent appearance of drug resistance and therapeutic failure (TF).The identification of factors that contribute to TF in leishmaniasis will provide the basis for a future therapeutic strategy more efficient for the control of this disease. In this article, we have evaluated the transcriptomic changes in the host cells THP-1after infection with clinicalLeishmania infantumisolates from leishmaniasis patientswith TF. Our results show that distinctL. infantumisolates differentially modulatehost cell response, inducing phenotypic changes that probably may account forparasite survival and TF of patients. Analysis of differential expression genes (DEGs),with a statistical significance threshold of a fold change >= 2 and a false discovery ratevalue <= 0.05, revealed a different number of DEGs according to theLeishmanialine.Globally, there was a similar number of genes up- and downregulated in all the infected host THP-1 cells, with exception of Hi-L2221, which showed a higher number of downregulated DEGs. We observed a total of 58 DEGs commonly modulated in all infected host cells, including upregulated (log2FC >= 1) and downregulated (log2FC <=-1)genes. Based on the results obtained from the analysis of RNA-seq, volcano plot, and GO enrichment analysis, we identified the most significant transcripts of relevance for their possible contribution to the TF observed in patients with leishmaniasis