iScience (Mar 2020)

TLR9 Polymorphisms Might Contribute to the Ethnicity Bias for EBV-Infected Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

  • Nabanita Roy Chattopadhyay,
  • Koustav Chatterjee,
  • Nikhil Tiwari,
  • Sudipta Chakrabarti,
  • Sushil Kumar Sahu,
  • Sankar Deb Roy,
  • Arijit Ghosh,
  • R. Rajendra Reddy,
  • Piyanki Das,
  • Sudipa Mal,
  • Basab Bijay Karnar,
  • Ashok Kumar Das,
  • Sam Tsering,
  • Komri Riba,
  • Zoreng puii,
  • Eric Zomawia,
  • Y. Indibar Singh,
  • Amol Ratnakar Suryawanshi,
  • Abhishek Kumar,
  • Dipyaman Ganguly,
  • Chandan Goswami,
  • Tathagata Choudhuri

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 23, no. 3

Abstract

Read online

Summary: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a rare malignancy in most parts of the world, but is endemic in some ethnic groups. The association of NPC with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is firmly established; however, the mechanism is still unclear. TLR9 is well known for its essential role in viral pathogen recognition and activation of innate immunity. Here, we report a set of TLR9 polymorphisms in the TIR-2 domain of the TLR9 protein collected from the EBV-infected NPC samples from northeast Indian populations sharing the aforesaid ethnicity. The occurrence of mutations is significantly high in these samples as we found a p value of <0.0001 at a significance level of 0.05. These might play an important role for the lack of function of TLR9 and thus for the higher occurrence of EBV-mediated NPC in such ethnic groups. : Biological Sciences; Human Genetics; Cancer Subject Areas: Biological Sciences, Human Genetics, Cancer