Human immune cell transcriptome

In the present study we used Affymetrix oligonucleotide microarrays to produce gene transcription profiles for the major leukocyte types in humans. This comprehensive dataset enabled us to not only establish which genes were expressed in each leukocyte type, but also which genes were expressed in each subset after activation. The used of a comprehensive dataset of gene profiles from all the major human leukocyte subsets enabled a novel and powerful means for identification of genes associated with single leukocyte subsets, or different immune paradigms. Keywords: Cell type comparison Different leukocyte subsets were either isolated or differentiated from human blood to obtain consistently >95% pure populations. Gene profiles for activated effector cells such as macrophages, neutrophils and mast cells were also generated. In most cases, microarray analyses were perform on samples from 2 independent donors.