Fig. 4
Intra-tracheal delivery of dsRNA in chickens results macrophage recruitment and the expression of IFN-β in lungs with no effect on H4N6 LPAIV infection. Day old chickens were treated with dsRNA (n = 4) at 250μg per egg or PBS (n = 5), infected with H4N6 LPAIV (1 × 106 PFU per chicken) intra-tracheally 24 h post-treatment and the lungs were collected in RNA Save for the quantification of H4N6 LPAIV genome loads 24 h post-infection (a) Separately another set of day old chickens were treated with dsRNA (n = 5) at 250μg per egg or PBS (n = 4) and lungs were collected in OCT for immunostaining of (b) IFN-α (c) IFN-β and (d) macrophages 24 h post-treatment coinciding with the H4N6 LPAIV infection. Student’s t-test was done to identify group differences and the differences were considered significant at P < 0.05. The quantitative data are given as the mean ± SEM