DNA chip technology in cardiovascular research

Global and/or dynamic analysis of the cardiac transcriptome may improve our understanding of the adaptation of cardiac tissue or cells to different physiological or pathological conditions. The achievement of sequencing projects on mammalian genomes and the development of DNA chip technology have dramatically extended the scale of gene expression studies from a candidate gene approach to a system approach. In current DNA chip experiments, expression levels of thousands of genes can be determined simultaneously. Obviously, the huge quantities of objects and information generated by these experiments require a computational management of the expression data with adequate mathematical (mostly statistical) algorithms. Here, we will discuss the principle and experimental key points of DNA chips. Four examples will be cited to illustrate applications in the cardiovascular system.