Bioinformatics analysis to identify the relationship between human papillomavirus-associated cervical cancer, toll-like receptors and exomes: A genetic epidemiology study.

Abstract

IntroductionGenetic variants may influence Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling in the immune response to human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and lead to cervical cancer. In this study, we investigated the pattern of TLR expression in the transcriptome of HPV-positive and HPV-negative cervical cancer samples and looked for variants potentially related to TLR gene alterations in exomes from different populations.Materials and methodsA cervical tissue sample from 28 women, which was obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus database, was used to examine TLR gene expression. Subsequently, the transcripts related to the TLRs that showed significant gene expression were queried in the Genome Aggregation Database to search for variants in more than 5,728 exomes from different ethnicities.ResultsCancer and HPV were found to be associated (pConclusionThe results of this study suggest that the variants found in the transcriptomes of different populations may lead to impairment of the functional aspect of TLRs that show significant gene expression in cervical cancer samples caused by HPV.