Microarray experiments are inevitably vulnerable to false positives and negatives due to non-specific binding of labelled cDNA probes, necessitating a more robust follow-up with highly sensitive methods. Due to such confounders, these data were used exclusively as a guide to select, for real-time PCR, the transcriptional targets of intracellular signalling pathways stimulated after inoculation with entry-defective HSV-1.