Nucleic Acid Extraction and RNA Sequencing
Total RNA from whole blood was extracted using the MagMAX for Stabilized Blood Tubes RNA Isolation Kit (ThermoFisher), after which globin mRNA depletion was performed using Ambion GLOBINclear (ThermoFisher). Transcript abundance was measured using the Illumina Human HT-12-v4 Expression Bead Chip after preparing fluorescent-labelled PCR products according to the Illumina Human Whole-Genome Gene Expression DASL Assay Guide. Only Illumina probes free of any single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were used to determine the expression level of the genes to avoid allele-specific artifacts.