DNA microarrays: implications for cardiovascular medicine

Dramatic progress has been made in the technologies available to assess global alterations in mRNA levels in both clinical and research samples. Through commercial services and institutional core laboratories, these technologies are increasingly accessible to individual investigators. Although such transcript profiling can provide a powerful research tool, the broad range of options can be bewildering for the uninitiated and more often than not the limitations and pitfalls of this approach are not fully appreciated. Moreover, consensus standards for data collection, analysis, and validation have yet to emerge. It is important to recognize that the goals of transcript profiling experiments can be quite diverse. These goals range from hypothesis generation and identification of novel therapeutic targets to delineation of complex patterns of gene expression that provide a potentially pathognomonic molecular phenotype. We will first present a practical review of the commonly used approaches for data collection and analysis, and discuss possible standards for contextual validation. We will then examine the clinical and scientific applications of DNA microarray technology with an emphasis on important limitations and implications for cardiovascular medicine.