Figure 3.

Cytokine secretion by wild type, Mincle- and Myd88-KO murine macrophages in response to infection with BCG, BCGΔBCG1419c and its complemented strain. BCG strains were obtained from planktonic cultures in 7H9 OADC 0.05% Tween 80 at OD600nm 0.8 and used to infect primary bone-marrow derived macrophages from mice as detailed in “Methods”. (a) TNF-α. (b) IL-6. (c) G-CSF. Macrophages were used for stimulation in duplicate or triplicate wells, giving an average cytokine values from 4 to 6 wells in each experiment. Bars indicate the mean cytokine values with individual values indicated as dots; error bars represent standard deviations of the mean. One-Way ANOVA followed by Dunnett’s multiple comparison test or Kruskal Wallis followed by Dunn’s multiple comparison test was used to assess significance of changes among BCG strains, depending on data distribution. An unpaired t test, Welch’s t test, or Mann–Whitney test was used to compare each cytokine produced by WT and each KO macrophage, depending on data distribution. Statistically significant p actual values are shown on top of the bars depicting the means.