Time-course experiments, in which the excitation and emission wavelength are fixed and fluorescence is measured over time, can be used as a highly sensitive method to identify ligand-induced conformational changes that lead to changes in the polarity of the environment surrounding the incorporated fluorophore (10).
I agree with Yusuf. You will need time control or non-infected control (whatever you like to call it). Otherwise you might have loose your focus point- whether your miRNA expression changed due to time or due to viral infection. First you can finish up this experiment and then you can decide the best way to explain it or publishing it.
It is better to compare your result with control for each time, that mean u choose the second way according to your question. Because the expression of miRNA can be also affected with the time.
You should estimate or test run a 1- or 4- scan single experiment to estimate proper nt to use. Note that signal/noise ratio goes with square-root of nt.
In general, you can array any parameter if you just want to repeat the same experiment. Here, pad (pre-acquisition delay) is used an example. If pad=600 d1=3 nt=64, the experiment waits 600 secs, followed by 64 scans with 3 secs recycle delay between the scans. To check how long the experiment takes, type time.
If waiting between each experiment is not desired, you can set pad=0 and array nt and give it the same value.
As the experiment goes, type wft f full aph to transform and auto-phase all. The 1st element is displayed. Make proper phase adjustment, expand region if necessary. Click Process->autoprocess to apply automatic processing (into a vertical stack mode with offset), but sometimes the macro doesn't work well.
After processing and proper display is made on screen, modify and enter the following commands: