The immune system and gene expression microarrays - new answers to old questions

Abstract

The recent increase in availability of gene expression technologies has the potential to dramatically expand our understanding of cellular immunology in molecular detail. Expression levels of tens of thousands of genes can be measured in dozens of samples in only a few days, and this data can be integrated with sequence informatics to tentatively assign some (limited) functional information to a majority of these genes. In this review we discuss some initial applications of these new tools to the fields of lymphocyte and monocyte differentiation pathways, the tolerance or immunity decision process, and B cell transformation. These examples illustrate the power of unbiased, 'wide-net', approaches both to drive immunological research in previously unexpected directions and to confirm classic tenets of immunology.

cDNA microarray analysis of non-selected cases of acute myeloid leukemia demonstrates distinct clustering independent of cytogenetic aberrations and consistent with morphological signs of differentiation

“…In contrast, AML cells with monocytic differentiation (FAB-M4/M5) showed altered expression of genes mainly involved in intracellular signal transduction and regulation of DNA-repair, cell cycle events or DNA transcription (Supplementary Table II). This last observation is consistent with reports regarding essential regulation of gene expression during monocyte differentiation (38,39). Previous studies have reported that unsupervised cluster analysis sorted AML samples according to cytogenetic abnormalities rather than FAB phenotypes (12) and that gene expression correlates with the common AML translocations [t(8;21), t(15;17), inv (16)], and translocations involving 11q23 have also been described (12,(40)(41)(42).…”

The Plant Virus Tomato Spotted Wilt Tospovirus Activates the Immune System of Its Main Insect Vector, Frankliniella occidentalis

“…Other studies, involving genomic-scale approaches to evaluate immune responses against viral infections, have used mostly cDNA microarrays (11,16,18,34,46,54). The method used here, which combined subtracted cDNA libraries and DNA macroarrays, is simple, practical, and less expensive than microarrays.…”

Development of a functional cDNA array for evaluation of the Th1/Th2 balance

“…Examples of success using this technology include the search for genes specifically expressed in diseases like cancer [25][26][27][28], viral infection [29], inflammation [30][31][32] or hematopoietic disorders [33], and the examination of genes specifically expressed in certain lineages of differentiated cells. However, we have experienced some difficulties in applying this technology.…”