Figure 4.

Effect of cytokines or β-estradiol on the expressions of interferon-inducible genes. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells from three healthy donors were cultured with the indicated cytokines for 24 hours. RNA was analyzed by quantitative RT-PCR as described in Materials and methods. Relative expression of the indicated genes – interferon-induced protein with tetratricopeptide repeats 1 (IFIT1), interferon-induced protein with tetratricopeptide repeats 3 (IFIT3), and interferon alpha-inducible protein 27 (IFI27) – compared with their nonstimulated cultures is shown. Each bar represents the mean value of duplicate wells as compared with the nonstimulated control. Downregulated genes were arbitrarily assigned a negative value.