Figure 1.
Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) stimulation induces a broad array of inflammatory proteins. (A) Whole blood from 25 healthy donors was incubated for 22 h in the presence of 3 × 105 CFU of BCG or buffer control (null condition). The culture supernatant was assayed for the expression levels of 32 proteins (Table S1 in Supplementary Material). Tukey box-whisker plots indicate those proteins (n = 17) that were significantly induced by BCG stimulation as compared to the null tube, as defined by ANOVA (filtered to include analytes with q value < 0.01). Analytes are ordered from the highest to the lowest fold change, BCG stimulation vs. null. (B–D) Whole blood from five healthy donors was incubated in the presence of 3 × 105 CFU of BCG or buffer control over a 30 h time course. At each time point, culture supernatants were collected and analyzed. (B) Heat map representation of the 17 BCG-induced proteins over the 30 h time course (0 h = pre-stimulation sample). Protein concentrations were log-transformed and ordered based on hierarchical clustering, showing the earliest (MIP-1β) to the latest (IL-17) induced protein analyte. Cytokines were color-coded based on their clustering. (C) Median concentration of four representative cytokines (one shown for immediate, early, intermediate, and late release) are shown, with graphical inlay plotting the first 4 h poststimulation. (D) Schematic representation illustrates the kinetic response for the 17 cytokines that were induced following BCG exposure.