Neuronal gene expression profiling: uncovering the molecular biology of neurodegenerative disease

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The development of gene array techniques to quantify expression levels of dozens to thousands of genes simultaneously within selected tissue samples from control and diseased brain has enabled researchers to generate expression profiles of vulnerable neuronal populations in several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Intriguingly, gene expression analysis reveals that vulnerable brain regions in many of these diseases share putative pathogenetic alterations in common classes of genes, including decrements in synaptic transcript levels and increments in immune response transcripts. Thus, gene expression profiles of diseased neuronal populations may reveal mechanistic clues to the molecular pathogenesis underlying various neurological diseases and aid in identifying potential therapeutic targets. This chapter will review how regional and single cell gene array technologies have advanced our understanding of the genetics of human neurological disease.

Medical Subject Headings

Animals; Brain (pathology, physiology); DNA Fingerprinting (methods); Gene Expression; Gene Expression Profiling (methods); Humans; Neurodegenerative Diseases (genetics); Neurons (pathology, physiology); Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis (methods)

Publication Date

1-1-2006

Publication Title

Progress in brain research

ISSN

0079-6123

Volume

158

First Page

197

Last Page

222

PubMed ID

17027698

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1016/S0079-6123(06)58010-0

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