Mining microarrays for metabolic meaning: nutritional regulation of hypothalamic gene expression.
DNA microarray analysis has been used to investigate relative changes in the level of gene expression in the CNS, including changes that are associated with disease, injury, psychiatric disorders, drug exposure or withdrawal, and memory formation. We have used oligonucleotide microarrays to identify hypothalamic genes that respond to nutritional manipulation. In addition to commonly used microarray analysis based on criteria such as fold-regulation, we have also found that simply carrying out multiple t tests then sorting by P value constitutes a highly reliable method to detect true regulation, as assessed by real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), even for relatively low abundance genes or relatively low magnitude of regulation. Such analyses directly suggested novel mechanisms that mediate effects of nutritional state on neuroendocrine function and are being used to identify regulated gene products that may elucidate the metabolic pathology of obese ob/ob, lean Vgf-/Vgf-, and other models with profound metabolic impairments.
Mobbs
Charles V
CV
Fishberg Research Center for Neurobiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York 10029, USA. charles.mobbs@mssm.edu
Yen
Kelvin
K
Mastaitis
Jason
J
Nguyen
Ha
H
Watson
Elizabeth
E
Wurmbach
Elisa
E
Sealfon
Stuart C
SC
Brooks
Andrew
A
Salton
Stephen R J
SR
D000824:Animal Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D000818:Animals; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation / Q000235:genetics*; D007031:Hypothalamus / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008660:Metabolism / Q000235:genetics*; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D009747:Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*