RESEARCH ARTICLE T Cell Transcriptomes Describe Patient Subtypes in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Background T cells regulate the adaptive immune response and have altered function in autoimmunity. Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) has great diversity of presentation and treatment response. Peripheral blood component gene expression affords an efficient platform to investigate SLE immune dysfunction and help guide diagnostic biomarker development for patient stratification. Methods Gene expression in peripheral blood T cell samples for 14 SLE patients and 4 controls was analyzed by high depth sequencing. Unbiased clustering of genes and samples revealed novel patterns related to disease etiology. Functional annotation of these genes highlights pathways and protein domains involved in SLE manifestation. Results We found transcripts for hundreds of genes consistently altered in SLE T cell samples, for which DAVID analysis highlights induction of pathways related to mitochondria, nucleotid