Early arthritis B cell gene expression profiling

242 patients recruited from an early arthritis clinic donated RNA and DNA from freshly isolated and purified peripheral blood CD19+ B cells. Global gene expression measurement was carried out using Illumina BeadChip HT12v4 microarrays. Objectives included the identification of B cell transcripts differentially expressed between disease phenotypes, where all patients were naive to immunomodulatory therapy. In addition an eQTL analysis was carried out with reference to known genotype data for this cohort of patients Cross sectional; diagnoses confirmed at >2 years' follow-up.