Fig. 7: Granulocytes exhibit divergent transcriptional programs during prosthetic joint (PJI) and craniotomy infection.

Mice subjected to craniotomy or PJI (n = 9 mice/model) were sacrificed at day 7 post-infection, whereupon Ly6G⁺ granulocytes were recovered from the galea and PJI tissue. Cells were pooled from three animals per model, resulting in three biological replicates. RNA was extracted and analyzed by bulk RNA-seq. A PCA and B volcano plots were used to illustrate transcriptional heterogeneity between groups and IPA was used to generate C pathway and D molecular analysis of differentially expressed genes. Independently, E–G gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was also conducted and presented as a heat map of sample normalized gene counts. H A published gene set was used to identify G-MDSC or PMN-transcriptional biases and statistical differences were determined between models with a two-tailed Student’s t-test (mean ± SEM; *p = 0.0365, **p = 0.0091). B DESeq2 was used to determine differential gene expression with control for false discovery rate. C–D A statistical pipeline in IPA was used to identify significant pathway and molecule differences, which relies on the right-tailed Fisher’s Exact Test. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.