Fig. 4.

The 2′-O-MTase mutant DENV induces a significant early innate immune response. (A) Heat map showing the normalized expression pattern of 48 genes that were selected for validation by qPCR. Genes with high expression levels were shown in red and those with low expression levels were in green. (B) Heat map showing the expression pattern of 43 of those genes as determined by qPCR. The expression levels were calculated using the delta-delta method. Genes with high expression levels were shown in red and those with low expression levels were in green. (C) The 2′-O-MTase mutant DENV induces a significant early innate immune response from as early as 2 h post-infection. In contrast, the wild-type DENV does not trigger an innate immune response until after 12 h post infection. The Loess method was used to fit the relative abundance of each group across each time point post-infection. It estimates the mean value non-parametrically for each data point of each data set (solid line) and the 95% confidence interval (CI) values of the mean (dashed lines). The time points at which the 95% CI lines of the 2′-O-MTase mutant DENV (green) and WT DENV (red) do not intersect denote instances of significant differences between them.