Bacterial Interaction with Platelets

Incubation of washed platelets with bacteria (5 × 10⁸–10⁹ platelets in 1:1 platelet to bacteria ratio, for three hours) was followed by centrifugation of the samples at 500 g for 10 minutes. The pellets were used for RNA isolation with a standard phenol-chloroform procedure. Briefly, centrifuged cells were resuspended in 500 µl Trizol reagent (Invitrogen, Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA, USA), and added to Phase lock tubes (QuantaBio, Beverly, MA, USA) together with chloroform. All centrifugation steps were performed as previously described^{26 (link)}. The RNA pellet was air-dried and resuspended in 40 µl RNAse free water.