Transcriptome Analysis

Introduction

In our project, we worked on establishing an artificial inter-kingdom communication between human cells and bacteria. However, the inter-kingdom communication was not known well. Therefore, we first had to choose appropriate signaling molecules to establish it. We chose one of the AHL molecules, 3-oxo-C8 HSL, as a signaling molecule from bacteria to human cells. This is because it can interact with only genetically engineered human cells [1, read TraI Assay page]. Next, we had to choose a signaling molecule from human cells to bacteria. Initially we had planned to use another AHL. However, we decided not to use AHLs as signal molecules from human cells to bacteria since AHLs cannot be synthesized by human cells due to lack of their materials [2]. Thus, we had to explore if there is a potential signaling molecule produced by human cells. To this end, E. coli cells were interacted with the supernatant of the medium which human cells were cultured. Then transcriptome analysis was conducted to observe if there were any differences in the gene expression in E. coli.

Summary

We checked the difference of transcription between E. coli in normal medium and E. coli in the medium which human cells were cultured. Surprisingly, there were no significant differences in almost all of the RNA expressions except for a couple of genes. The difference was only a little even for those genes.