Japanese encephalitis (JE) is a mosquito-borne disease that is widely prevalent in the temperate and a tropical zone of Asia. This disease is caused by Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), a positive sense single-stranded RNA virus, and is transmitted mainly by Culex mosquitoes.The intracellular pathogens utilize numerous cellular components of host cell to enter the host cell as well as for the advancement of infection. By using host gene micro arrays, we can explore the host response at the level of gene ex-pression and provide a molecular description of the events in JEV – Host interaction. A neurovirulent JEV strain, JE-S982, was employed throughout this study. The propagation of virus was carried out in C6/36 cells. Virus titers were determined by a plaque-forming assay on PS cells. In this study, we analyzed gene ex-pression profile of mouse neuronal cell infected by JEV at an MOI of 5 using Agilent mouse whole genome micro array comprising of 44,000 mouse whole genome cDNAs. The total RNA was isolated from JEV infected and mock infected neuronal cells at 36 hours post infection. A total of 723 genes were found to be significantly regulated after JEV infection, among this 498 genes were up regulated with ratio of 1.5 and above and 224 genes were down regulated with ratio of 0.66 and below. Analysis of gene signatures revealed induction of strong innate immune response and inflammatory response. Among this, the genes involved in different signaling pathways like MAPK signaling pathway, Toll-like receptor signaling Pathway, Jak-STAT signaling pathway, Endoplasmic reticulum stress response etc. were found be regulated. Results of this preliminary study were validated with real time PCR profiling of few select genes involved in signaling pathway. These pathways may have significant role in the pathogenesis of JEV as well as in host antiviral response.
