title: Effects of acupuncture on the gene expression profile of lung tissue             from normal rats.
abstract: Acupuncture has been demonstrated to be an effective treatment for various diseases. However, little attention has been paid to its physiological influences, especially on the changes in protein and mRNA levels following acupuncture treatment under normal conditions. In this study, we investigated the gene expression profile of lung tissue from acupuncture-treated normal rats and attempted to characterize the underlying mechanisms of the changes in expression. Three common acupoints, Dazhui (GV14), fengmen (BL12) and feishu (BL13) were selected for analysis, and 2 serial analyses of gene expression (SAGE) tag libraries of the lung tissues that were derived from the normal and acupuncture-treated rats were established. Bioinformatic analyses were carried out using the functional annotation tools of the database for annotation, visualization and integrated discovery (DAVID), the gene ontology (GO) Tree Machine and the Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis. In total, 144 tags were differentially expressed (P<0.05), and the DAVID functional classification of genes demonstrated that the genes were divided into 6 types. Furthermore, GO Tree Machine analysis of the gene categories indicated that 10 enriched GO categories had become enriched after acupuncture, and that 15 KEGG pathways matched the differentially expressed tags of the 2 SAGE libraries. Our results show that the essential effects of acupuncture on normal rats include the regulation of macromolecular biosynthesis, transportation and metabolism. Cellular biosynthesis and cellular lipid metabolism are the common biological processes that occur in response to acupuncture under normal and morbid conditions, which may be the general physiological effects of acupuncture.
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Research Institute of Acupuncture and Meridian, Yue Yang Hospital, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, PR China.
authors.forename: Lei-Miao
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Yin
authors.forename: Yu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yu-Dong
authors.initials: YD
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Yan-Yan
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Wei-Rong
authors.initials: WR
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.forename: Qing-Hua
authors.initials: QH
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Yong-Qing
authors.initials: YQ
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D015670:Acupuncture Therapy; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D015723:Gene Library; D050356:Lipid Metabolism; D008168:Lung / Q000166:cytology / Q000378:metabolism* / Q000502:physiology; D008171:Lung Diseases / Q000378:metabolism / Q000628:therapy*; D008297:Male; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D012313:RNA / Q000032:analysis / Q000378:metabolism; D012333:RNA, Messenger / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D014158:Transcription, Genetic; D059467:Transcriptome
chemical_list: D012333:RNA, Messenger; D012313:RNA