For microarray-based gene-expression analysis, we pooled equal shares of seven individual RNA samples isolated from the spleen in six separate specimens according to treatment and tank (A1, B1, C1; A2, B2, C2). These six RNA pools were converted to Cy3-labelled cRNA and hybridised with 8 × 60 K Agilent-049158 Salmon Oligo Microarrays (Agilent Technologies; GEO platform: GPL21057) following the Agilent 60-mer oligo microarray processing protocol, as described in our previous paper36 . The fluorescence signals of the hybridised Agilent microarrays were scanned with a G2505C Microarray Scanner System (Agilent Technologies) at a resolution of 3 µm.
For all hybridisations, two technical replicates were included representing exactly the same samples but applied to independent arrays. The reliability of the microarray-predicted data has previously been proven in various quantitative PCR studies of our group9 ,23 (link),69 (link),82 (link),83 (link).
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