Figure 4

Temporal ordering of clusters reveals progression of the DC maturation process induced by poly(I:C). The top 42 consensus clusters for the 2-fold filtered data set were manually placed into groups based on the visual expression profile exhibited by the heat map representation of each cluster. Five phases were identified for both the up- and down-regulated clusters: early, early-mid, mid, mid-late and late. These groups of clusters with similar expression patterns were ordered temporally to create a timeline. Each phase has one or more representative cluster heat maps, which indicate the patterns associated with that phase, and a red arrow indicating how long that phase lasted. A summary of the annotations included in each phase is provided next to each representative heat map (obtained from DAVID). Heat maps are formatted so that rows represent genes and columns are time points (3, 6, 12 and 24 hours); yellow indicates up-regulation, blue indicates down-regulation, and black indicates no change in expression relative to time zero. Phase assignments for each consensus cluster are included in Additional file 4: Table S2.