Researchers Discover Gene Set That Predicts Post-Treatment Lyme Disease

Daniel J.B. Clarke, et al, published “Gene set predictor for post-treatment Lyme disease” in Cell Reports Medicine on November 15, 2022. The researchers enrolled 152 study participants, each with symptoms of post-treatment Lyme disease (PTLD), to analyze their peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) with RNA sequencing (RNA-seq). RNA-seq data from 72 individuals with acute Lyme disease and 44 uninfected controls were incorporated to examine variations in differential gene expression.

The majority of the PTLD participants had a distinguished inflammatory signature when compared to the group with acute Lyme disease. When the researchers distilled the gene sets from this study with gene sets from other sources, they discovered a subgroup of genes that are highly expressed in the groups but have not previously been established as biomarkers for inflammatory response or other viral or bacterial diseases. The gene set was further reduced by feature importance to determine an mRNA biomarker set that is capable of differentiating healthy persons from those with acute Lyme disease or PTLD as a candidate with the potential to be translated into a Lyme disease diagnostic.

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Read the study in Cell Reports Medicine.

Read more about Lyme disease diagnostics.