Briefly, peripheral blood was drawn by venipuncture into PAXgene tubes (BD Diagnostics), and RNA was isolated using standard protocols (Qiagen, Inc.). Globin transcripts were removed using GLOBINclear™ kit (Life Technologies), and samples were prepared for sequencing using the Encore complete kit (NuGEN). Paired-end sequencing of 100-bp reads was performed using the Illumina HiSeq 2000 by standard procedures. The quality of sequencing data was checked using the FastQC v0.11.2 tool (Supplementary Table 7); sequencing adapters were removed using Trimmomatic v0.33.19 (link) Short reads were aligned to the GRCh38/hg38 human genome assembly using TopHat v2.0.9.20 (link) A matrix of raw counts per gene was assembled using htseq-count21 (link) and Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.80.gtf gene models obtained from the Ensembl web site. A matrix of quartile-normalized fragments per kilobase of exons per million reads mapped (FPKM) counts was calculated using the cuffnorm v2.2.1 tool.20 (link) To filter out low expressed signals, as recommended by several method comparison studies,14 (link),22 (link)–24 (link) genes having zero FPKM expression in at least one sample were removed, keeping 18,697 expressed genes out of 65,217 total gene models.