Conjunctival fibrosis & the innate barriers to Chlamydia trachomatis intracellular infection
Conjunctival fibrosis and the innate barriers to Chlamydia trachomatis intracellular infection: a genome wide association study
Chlamydia trachomatis causes both trachoma (the leading infectious cause of blindness) and sexually transmitted infections. These diseases have similar pathology and may have similar genetic predisposing factors, but obtaining statistically well powered samples is very challenging in both contexts. In this seminar I will talk about two genome-wide association scans in Chlamydia related traits. The first study focuses on pathology by looking at trachomatous scarring of the conjunctiva in around 2600 Gambians (1090 cases). The second, rather smaller study (n = 240, 71 cases) meanwhile considers the innate barriers to infection in relation to high risk women attending genitourinary health clinics in Europe who either do or do not have evidence of antibodies against Chlamydia trachomatis. Additional power was leveraged from a pathways based analysis of both data sets. I will present the findings of these studies, along with some additional data from a new analysis of published transcriptome data from trachoma cases in Gambia and Tanzania.
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