Gene expression profiles of whole blood incubated with live meningococci

Blood from two donors was incubated for timepoints up to 24 hours in the presence and absence of live meningococci. The donors are labelled NP and SW. 'SWB' refers to blood that was incubated with meningococci; 'Unstim' refers to control blood incubated in the absence of meningococci. Duplicate arrays were prepared for the majority of timepoints ('a' and 'b'), except where the array of of poor quality and not used in the analysis. We infected heparinised whole blood from two healthy donors (adult volunteers) with 108 live meningococci, serogroup B, type MC58, as previously described.8 Blood was incubated at 37°C for 0, 1, 3, 6, 12, and 24 h. At every timepoint we removed a sample and harvested the plasma by centrifugation (1200 g, 10 min). We gathered the remaining blood into RNA stabilisation fluid. Uninfected control blood was obtained for every timepoint. An all pairs experiment design type is where all labeled extracts are compared to every other labeled extract. Keywords: all_pairs Using regression correlation