Fig. 2.

CLL MDCs display characteristics similar to M2 macrophages. Microarray data from monocytes on day 0 and MDCs on day 7 from sensitive and resistant patients were compared to those from GEO accession GSE5099. Datasets were merged on common genes and the program ‘virtualArray’ was applied to remove platform specific batch effects using an unsupervised empirical Bayes algorithm. (A) multidimensional scaling plot and (B) heatmap of the top 500 genes with the most variable expression. Both figures show a similar pattern: the day 0 monocytes of the current study are most similar to the day 0 monocytes obtained by Martinez et al. (ref. 7) while the day 7 macrophages of the current study cluster close to the day 7 macrophages and M2 macrophages of Martinez et al. (ref. 7). M1 cells have a gene expression profile that is dissimilar to any other cell type either in the previously published study or the current study.