Transcriptional profiling of ARPE-19 cells infected with high capacity MCMV vector.

To gain a detailed knowledge about the virus cycle of murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV) and its high capacity vector in cross-species settings, we analyzed the early and late viral and host transcriptome upon infection of human cells. ARPE-19, A549, and 911 cells (5.0×10⁵ cells/well) were infected in a 24-well format 4 h post-seeding with MCMV-wt or Q4-LRBAs-GLuc, a high capacity replication competent vector based on MCMV, at an MOI of 3. As control, we used infection of mouse embryonic fibroblast, which is the natural host of the wild type MCMV, treated similarly. Harvesting occurred at 8 hpi and 31 hpi through centrifugation at 1.000 g for 5 min. Cell pellets were washed with PBS, re-suspended in 350 µL of RLT buffer, and processed using the RNeasy Mini kit as per the manufacturer’s instructions in independent triplicates. At least 1.500 ng of RNA in a 30 µL volume was isolated and sent for Illumina next-generation sequencing, resulting in paired-end sequencing with a read length of 2×100 bp and a depth of 20 million reads. This submission contains the reads, we obtained analyzing the infections of ARPE-19 cells. The data sheet for the samples and the reference genomes (.gb), which we used in the analysis published in Riedl et al. Vaccines 2024 can be found in the REFERENCES_ARPE-19.zip folder. Please, find the control reads for uninfected cells in a separate upload entitled: Mock infected controls for transcriptional profiling of infections with high capacity MCMV vector (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1250410).