Molecular Microbiology Research, 2025, Vol.15, No.1, 10-17 http://microbescipublisher.com/index.php/mmr 10 Research Insight Open Access Observation of Immune Gene Expression in Goats Under FMD Virus Infection Wenzhong Huang, Zhongmei Hong Tropical Animal Medicine Research Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resources, Sanya, 572000, Hainan, China Corresponding author: zhongmei.hong@hitar.org Molecular Microbiology Research, 2025, Vol.15, No.1 doi: 10.5376/mmr.2025.15.0002 Received: 03 Nov., 2024 Accepted: 05 Jan., 2025 Published: 26 Jan., 2025 Copyright © 2025 Huang and Hong, This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Preferred citation for this article: Huang W.Z., and Hong Z.M., 2025, Observation of immune gene expression in goats under FMD virus infection, Molecular Microbiology Research, 15(1): 10-17 (doi: 10.5376/mmr.2025.15.0002) Abstract This study explores the immune gene expression patterns of goats under foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) infection to reveal the key immune response mechanisms of the host in response to viral infection. Foot-and-mouth disease is a highly infectious disease affecting even-unghou animals and poses a serious threat to global animal husbandry. This study uses high-throughput sequencing technology to conduct transcriptome analysis of goat immune cells infected with FMDV to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs), and explore the functions and pathways of these genes in the immune response through gene ontology (GO) annotation and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis. This study provides important data for a deep understanding of the host-pathogen interactions of goats under FMDV infection, and provides a theoretical basis for the development of targeted vaccines and gene editing technologies, which has important practical application value. Keywords Foot-and-mouth disease virus; Goat immune response; Differentially expressed genes; Transcriptome analysis; Vaccine development 1 Introduction Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) is a highly contagious virus that affects cows, sheep, pigs and other even-unged animals. Goats are one of them. Once infected, not only will the animal health be affected, but it will also cause serious economic losses, especially in developing countries (Lüet al., 2018). Therefore, controlling and preventing FMDV has become a focus of the animal husbandry industry. To do a good job of prevention and control, we must first figure out how animals respond to the virus. Goats are common in animal husbandry, but there is not much research on how they resist FMDV at present. In contrast, there are much more research on cattle and pigs (Li et al., 2015). However, existing studies have pointed out that genes such as immune-related can play a big role in viral infection (Li et al., 2019). This shows that it is necessary to further understand the immune mechanism of goats when infected with FMDV. To this end, we conducted this study. We will collect goat immune cells infected with FMDV and use high-throughput sequencing for transcriptome analysis. We intend to use RNA-Seq technology to find differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and see what role these genes play in the immune response. At the same time, we will conduct gene ontology (GO) annotation and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis to classify these genes to see which immune processes they are involved in. Ultimately, we hope to find some key immune regulation mechanisms to provide data support for the prevention and treatment of foot-and-mouth disease and vaccine development. 2 Overview of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus 2.1 Classification and genomic characteristics of FMDV Foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV) is a particularly contagious virus that affects many farmed animals around the world. It mainly infects even-hung species, such as goats, cattle, pigs, sheep, and some wild animals can also be infected (Eschbaumer et al., 2016). This virus belongs to the Picornaviridae family, Picornaviridae, and is a single positive-strand RNA virus. A major feature of FMDV is its fast mutation, which is why it is difficult to completely control or eliminate. Its genome is not complex, it only has one RNA strand. This chain can encode
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjQ4ODYzNA==