Gene profiling techniques and their application in angiogenesis and vascular development

The analysis of gene expression in specific tissues and physiological processes has evolved over the last 20 years from the painstaking identification of selected genes to the relatively efficient and open-ended surveying of potentially all genes expressed in a tissue. Current art for gene discovery includes the use of large-scale arrays of cDNA sequences or oligonucleotides, and molecular 'tagging' techniques such as GeneCalling and SAGE. Common to each of these techniques is a reliance on the increasingly comprehensive databases of human and mouse EST and full-length gene sequences. Early efforts to characterize candidate genes were limited by their narrow scope, while current efforts are confounded by the enormous volume of data returned. Sophisticated software tools are an integral part of the analysis, helping to organize information into coherent groups with temporal or functional similarity. These techniques, in conjunction with the continued analysis of human genetic syndromes, transgenic, and knockout mice, have driven genetic analysis of angiogenesis and vascular development from describing which individual genes are involved to defining the outlines of regulatory networks.