To what extent is blood a reasonable surrogate for brain in gene expression studies: estimation from mouse hippocampus and spleen

Frontiers in Neuroscience

Steven Whatley¹  Leonard CSchalkwyk¹  Cathy Fernandes¹  Matthew N Davies¹  Sarah Lawn¹  Robert W Williams² 

[1] King's College London;University of Tennessee Medical School;

关键词: Gene Expression;    Hippocampus;    Spleen;    recombinant inbred strain;    surrogacy;   

DOI  :  10.3389/neuro.15.002.2009

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Microarrays are designed to measure genome-wide differences in gene expression. In cases where a tissue is not accessible for analysis (e.g. human brain), it is of interest to determine whether a second, accessible tissue could be used as a surrogate for transcription profiling. Surrogacy has applications in the study of behavioural and neurodegenerative disorders. Comparison between hippocampus and spleen mRNA obtained from a mouse recombinant inbred panel indicates a high degree of correlation between the tissues for genes that display a high heritability of expression level.This correlation is not limited to apparent expression differences caused by sequence polymorphisms in the target sequences and includes both cis and trans genetic effects. A tissue such as blood could therefore give surrogate information on expression in brain for a subset of genes, in particular those co-expressed between the two tissues, which have heritably varying expression.

【 授权许可】

Unknown