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Background: Precise differential diagnosis between acute viral and bacterial infections is important to enable appropriate therapy, avoid unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions and optimize the use of hospital resources. A systems view of host response to infections provides opportunities for discovering sensitive and robust molecular diagnostics., Methods: We combine blood transcriptomes from six independent datasets (n = 756) with a knowledge-based human protein-protein interaction network, identifies subnetworks capturing host response to each infection class, and derives common response cores separately for viral and bacterial infections. We subject the subnetworks to a series of computational filters to identify a parsimonious gene panel and a standalone diagnostic score that can be applied to individual samples. We rigorously validate the panel and the diagnostic score in a wide range of publicly available datasets and in a newly developed Bangalore-Viral Bacterial (BL-VB) cohort., Finding: We discover a 10-gene blood-based biomarker panel (Panel-VB) that demonstrates high predictive performance to distinguish viral from bacterial infections, with a weighted mean AUROC of 0.97 (95% CI: 0.96-0.99) in eleven independent datasets (n = 898). We devise a new stand-alone patient-wise score (VB 10 ) based on the panel, which shows high diagnostic accuracy with a weighted mean AUROC of 0.94 (95% CI 0.91-0.98) in 2996 patient samples from 56 public datasets from 19 different countries. Further, we evaluate VB 10 in a newly generated South Indian (BL-VB, n = 56) cohort and find 97% accuracy in the confirmed cases of viral and bacterial infections. We find that VB 10 is (a) capable of accurately identifying the infection class in culture-negative indeterminate cases, (b) reflects recovery status, and (c) is applicable across different age groups, covering a wide spectrum of acute bacterial and viral infections, including uncharacterized pathogens. We tested our VB 10 score on publicly available COVID-19 data and find that our score detected viral infection in patient samples., Interpretation: Our results point to the promise of VB 10 as a diagnostic test for precise diagnosis of acute infections and monitoring recovery status. We expect that it will provide clinical decision support for antibiotic prescriptions and thereby aid in antibiotic stewardship efforts., Funding: Grand Challenges India, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest NC and SR have obtained a provisional patent for Panel-VB and VB(10)- score (IN Application No: 202041015738). NC is a co-founder of qBiome Research Pvt Ltd and Healthseq Precision Medicine Pvt Ltd, which have no role in this manuscript. The other authors have no conflicts to disclose., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Pathogens that are introduced suddenly to natural populations can potentially cause quick changes to the genetics and diversity of the host. In the past three decades, white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) has caused damaging epizootics in Penaeus monodon populations. In this study, we developed WSSV resistance- or susceptibility-linked microsatellite DNA markers, and their effectiveness was validated experimentally. WSSV-resistant marker linked retroelements and genes that may have an important role in WSSV-resistance phenomena were partially identified. Allelic data of 1,694 samples from nine distinct geographic locations in India were revealed that populations from Digha and Kochi were highly dispersed, and also showed higher genetic diversity, higher population diversity, and lower prevalence of disease resistance. A very high level of gene flow was observed within all populations and a very high level of genetic variation was present within populations. Two genetically admixture population clusters were estimated in nature. WSSV-resistance has a significant link with genetic diversity, population cluster and population diversity. Microsatellite marker analysis characterized genetic divergence, diversity and structure among wild populations., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: Tumour necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), a pro-inflammatory cytokine has been implicated in the pathophysiology of several viral infections. TNF-α promoter gene polymorphism is thus believed to play the modulating role in this disease pathogenesis. Several studies have shown the increased level of TNF-α in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). However, the role of the TNF-α promoter polymorphism is yet to be delineated in this regard. The present study for the first time tried to explore the association of TNF-α gene polymorphism with DCM of viral aetiology., Materials and Methods: Eighteen histopathologically proven DCM cases with viral genome positivity and 17 healthy controls were genotyped using polymerase chain reaction of TNF-α promoter gene followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism to determine the SNPs of -238G/A, -308G/A, -857C/T and -863C/A., Results: Of the 18 DCM cases 4 (22.2%) were positive for adenovirus (AdV), 2 (11.1%) for enterovirus (EV) and 12 (66.7%) had co-infection. Six of the 18 DCM cases (35.3%) had -238G/A polymorphism, and 10 (55.5%) had -863 homozygous AA genotype. The association of these polymorphisms was statistically significant as compared to controls (P < 0.05)., Conclusions: The present pilot study suggests the possible association of TNFα -238G/A and -863C/A polymorphism with DCM of viral aetiology.