Fifty microliters of serum was aliquoted for the RNA and DNA extraction respectively. One hundred and fifty microliter of 1x DNase buffer (Roche, Mannheim, Germany) was added to each aliquot of serum after which the sample was treated with nucleases -100 U DNase (Roche, Mannheim, Germany) and 2 μg RNase (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, USA) for two hours at 37°C in order to degrade the host nucleic acid. Trizol was added to one of the two aliquots and RNA was extracted using a combination of Trizol and Qiagen RNAeasy kit. DNA was extracted using the Qiagen DNAeasy mini extraction kit according to the manufacturer's instructions and eluted in 50 μl elution buffer (EB). The DNA and RNA were amplified by random PCR as described earlier [25] . Before sequencing, the primers were cleaved using EcoRV (NEB, Ipswich, MA, USA) and the cleaved product was purified using the Qiagen PCR purification kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany) and eluted in 30 μl EB. 