HPAI-resistant Ri chickens exhibit elevated antiviral immune-related gene expression.

BACKGROUND

Highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (HPAIVs) is an extremely contagious and high mortality rates in chickens resulting in substantial economic impact on the poultry sector. Therefore, it is necessary to elucidate the pathogenic mechanism of HPAIV for infection control.

OBJECTIVE

Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) can effectively avoid the limitations of subjective screening for differential gene expression. Therefore, we performed GSEA to compare HPAI-infected resistant and susceptible Ri chicken lines.

METHODS

The Ri chickens (A)/(B21) were chosen as resistant, and the chickens (G)/(B13) were selected as susceptible by genotyping the Mx and BF2 genes. The tracheal tissues of HPAIV H5N1 infected chickens were collected for RNA sequencing followed by GSEA analysis to define gene subsets to elucidate the sequencing results.

RESULTS

We identified four differentially expressed pathways, which were immune-related pathways with a total of 78 genes. The expression levels of cytokines (, , ), chemokines ( and ), type interferons and their receptors (, , , and ), Jak-STAT signaling pathway genes (, , and ), MHC class I and II and their co-stimulatory molecules (, , , , , and ), and interferon stimulated genes ( and ) in resistant chickens were higher than those in susceptible chickens.

CONCLUSIONS

Resistant Ri chickens exhibit a stronger antiviral response to HPAIV H5N1 compared with susceptible chickens. Our findings provide insights into the immune responses of genetically disparate chickens against HPAIV.