Gene expression profiling of healthy controls upon Interferon-beta stimulation

This experiment was carried out in the context of a pharmacogenetic study of long-term (4-year follow-up) response to Interferon-beta treatment in two cohorts of Italian Multiple Sclerosis patients, to identify genetic variants (SNPs) that may influence response to IFN-beta. We integrated results from meta-analysis of the two cohorts with gene expression profiling of IFNβ stimulated PBMCs from 20 healthy controls and eQTL analyses, to look at possible enrichment of IFN-beta induced genes with genes mapped by top-ranking meta-analyzed SNPs. Total RNA obtained from isolated PBMC extracted from healthy subjects and in vitro stimulated or not with Interferon-β (100IU/mL) for 18h