Bioinformatics analysis in identifying significantly expressed immune related genes in influenza A virus infection

Abstract

This study is done to identify significantly expressed genes of influenza A virus infection in human, facilitated by the idea of checking for the presence of immune related genes in these significantly expressed genes, followed by the analysis of their potential mechanism and pathway. Considering the usage of microarray dataset, the gene expression profile GSE66597 was downloaded from the gene expression omnibus(GEO) database, and then a subsequent generation of differentially expressed genes(DEGs) using the GEO2R tool. A total of 1107 genes was generated with 703 upregulated and 404 downregulated genes. The protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was constructed using string and Cytoscape software which resulted in generating the core genes, hub genes, and bottleneck genes. Subsequent Venn diagram analysis finally gave the six candidate genes CRP, CCL5, IL17A, STAT1, CD34, SPI1, subjected to gene ontology (GO) and Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) for enrichment and pathway analysis respectively. Out of the initial six candidate genes, four of these genes CRP, CCL5, IL17A, are immune related, and initiated particularly by the presence of influenza A virus.