Toll-Like Receptor Gene Polymorphisms in a Population-Based Study of HIV and Tuberculosis Patients from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Abstract

Genetic diversity of human populations is determined by polymorphic variants of immune response genes and can be linked to the variation in responses to infectious agents. This study compared allele and genotype frequencies of polymorphic variants of the TLR1, TLR2, TLR4, TLR6, and TLR8 genes between samples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We included 680 unrelated individuals from Eastern Slavic (n = 308), Armenian (n = 137), Tajik (n = 138), and Kyrgyz (n = 97) samples of patients with confirmed diagnoses of HIV and tuberculosis. The international 1000 Genomes Project data—samples of Caucasians (EUR) and countries of eastern (EAS) and southern (SAS) Asia—were used for comparison. Despite the lack of genetic diversity and population differences in allele frequencies of the analyzed genes, the samples differed in a number of loci both from each other and from EAS and SAS samples.