Effects and associated transcriptomic landscape changes of methamphetamine on immune cells

Abstract

Background Methamphetamine (METH) abuse causes serious health problems, including injury to the immune system, leading to increased incidence of infections and even making withdrawal more difficult. Of course, immune cells, an important part of the immune system, are also injured in methamphetamine abuse. However, due to different research models and the lack of bioinformatics, the mechanism of METH injury to immune cells has not been clarified. Methods We examined the response of three common immune cell lines, namely Jurkat, NK-92 and THP-1 cell lines, to methamphetamine by cell viability and apoptosis assay in vitro, and examined their response patterns at the mRNA level by RNA-sequencing. Differential expression analysis of two conditions (control and METH treatment) in three types of immune cells was performed using the DESeq2 R package (1.20.0). And some of the differentially expressed genes were verified by qPCR. We performed Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analysis of differentially expressed genes by the clusterProfiler R package (3.14.3). And gene enrichment analysis was also performed using MetaScape (www.metascape.org). Results The viability of the three immune cells was differentially affected by methamphetamine, and the rate of NK-cell apoptosis was significantly increased. At the mRNA level, we found disorders of cholesterol metabolism in Jurkat cells, activation of ERK1 and ERK2 cascade in NK-92 cells, and disruption of calcium transport channels in THP-1 cells. In addition, all three cells showed changes in the phospholipid metabolic process. Conclusions The results suggest that both innate and adaptive immune cells are affected by METH abuse, and there may be commonalities between different immune cells at the transcriptome level. These results provide new insights into the potential effects by which METH injures the immune cells.

Methamphetamine induces a low dopamine transporter expressing state without altering the total number of peripheral immune cells

“…Multiple reports have shown T cells in various tissues are adversely impacted following METH exposure, 30,31 by dysregulating T cells' classical functions such as proliferation, cytokine secretion, tissue infiltration and cytotoxicity. [31][32][33][34][35] In addition, in individuals with HIV, METH increases viral adhesion, replication and disease progression, leading to persistent reductions in T cell populations. 31,36 Hence, we tested whether DAT expression is reduced in T cell subsets following methamphetamine treatment focusing on DAT-expressing CD3+, CD4+ and CD8+ T cells (Figure 2).…”

Warburg effect enhanced by AKR1B10 promotes acquired resistance to pemetrexed in lung cancer-derived brain metastasis

“…For RNA-sequencing, differential expression analysis was performed using the DESeq2 R package (1.20.0) where genes with an adjusted p-value < 0.05 found by DESeq2 were assigned as differentially expressed, and ClusterProfiler R package was used for Gene Ontology (GO) and KEGG enrichment analysis [ 22 , 23 ]. The codes reference resource was provided in the Additional file 2 : Table S2.…”

Comparative Genomic Hybridization and Transcriptome Sequencing Reveal Genes with Gain in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: JUP Expression Emerges as a Survival-Related Gene

“…These sequences were deposited in the GEO NCBI repository ( with public access on 31 October 2021) and identified with accession number GSE189641 [ 33 ]. To contrast with our data, additional datasets were downloaded from JURKAT (SRP370930) [ 34 ], CEM (SRP319983) [ 35 ], and SUP-B15 (SRP319983 and SRP189893) [ 36 ]. Finally, peripheral blood derived from clinically healthy subjects (SRP281919) [ 37 ] and nonleukemia adult bone marrow data (SRP114952) [ 38 ] were also included as controls.…”