Integrative genomics of the mammalian alveolar macrophage response to intracellular mycobacteria

Bovine tuberculosis (bTB), caused by infection with Mycobacterium bovis, is a major disease affecting cattle globally as well as being a zoonotic risk to human health. The key innate immune cell that first encounters M. bovis is the alveolar macrophage, previously shown to be substantially reprogrammed during intracellular infection by the pathogen. Here we use multi-omics and network biology approaches to analyse the macrophage transcriptional response to M. bovis infection and identify core infection response pathways and gene modules. These outputs were integrated with results from genome-wide associations of M. bovis infection to enhance the detection of putative genomic variants for disease resistance. Our results show that network-based integration of relevant transcriptomics data can extract additional information from large genome-wide associations and that this approach could also be used to integrate relevant functional genomics outputs with results from genomic association studies for human tuberculosis caused by the related Mycobacterium tuberculosis.