Metabolomics,Unknown,Transcriptomics,Genomics,Proteomics

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The Effects of Globin on Microarray-based Gene Expression Analysis of Mouse Blood

ABSTRACT: Peripheral whole blood-based gene expression profiling has become one of the most common strategies exploited in the development of clinically relevant biomarkers. However, the ability to identify biologically meaningful conclusions from gene expression patterns in whole blood is highly problematic. First, it is difficult to know whether or not expression patterns in whole blood capture those in primary tissues. Second, if explicit steps are not taken to accommodate the extremely elevated expression levels of globin in blood then large-scale multi-probe microarray-based studies can be severely compromised. Many studies consider the use of mouse blood as a model for human blood in addition to considering blood gene expression levels as a general surrogate for gene expression levels in other tissues. We explored the effects of globin reduction on peripheral mouse blood in the detection of genes known to be expressed in human tissues. Globin reduction resulted in 1.) a significant increase in the number of probes detected (5840 ± 944 vs 12411 ± 1904); 2.) increased expression for 4128 probe sets compared to non-globin reduced blood (p < .001, ≥ two-fold); 3.) improved detection of genes associated with many biological pathways and diseases; and 4.) an increased ability to detect genes expressed in 27 human tissues (p < 10-4). This study suggests that although microarray-based mouse blood gene expression studies that do not consider the effects of globin are severely compromised, globin-reduced mouse whole blood gene expression studies can be used to capture the expression profiles of genes known to contribute to various human diseases. Whole and GLOBINclear-treated paired blood samples from 18 mice representing 3 mice from 6 different isogenic mice strains.

ORGANISM(S): Mus musculus

SUBMITTER: Mary Winn

PROVIDER: E-GEOD-19282 | biostudies-arrayexpress |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-arrayexpress

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The effects of globin on microarray-based gene expression analysis of mouse blood.

Winn Mary E ME Zapala Matthew A MA Hovatta Iiris I Risbrough Victoria B VB Lillie Elizabeth E Schork Nicholas J NJ

Mammalian genome : official journal of the International Mammalian Genome Society 20100516 5-6

The use of mouse blood as a model for human blood is often considered in the development of clinically relevant, gene expression-based disease biomarkers. However, the ability to derive biologically meaningful insights from microarray-based gene expression patterns in mouse whole blood, as in human whole blood, is hindered by high levels of globin mRNA. In order to characterize the effects of globin reduction on gene expression of peripheral mouse blood, we performed gene set enrichment analysis ...[more]

PMID: 20473674

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Project description:Room temperature whole blood mRNA stabilization procedures, such as the PAX gene system, are critical for the application of transcriptional analysis to population-based clinical studies. Global transcriptome analysis of whole blood RNA using microarrays has proven to be challenging due to the high abundance of globin transcripts that constitute 70% of whole blood mRNA in the blood. This is a particular problem in patients with sickle-cell disease, secondary to the high abundance of globin-expressing nucleated red blood cells and reticulocytes in the circulation . In order to more accurately measure the steady state whole blood transcriptome in sickle-cell patients, we evaluated the efficacy of reducing globin transcripts in PAXgene stabilized RNA samples for genome-wide transcriptome analyses using oligonucleotide arrays. We demonstrate here by both microarrays and Q-PCR that the globin mRNA depletion method resulted in 55-65 fold reduction in globin transcripts in whole blood collected from healthy volunteers and sickle-cell disease patients. This led to an improvement in microarray data quality with increased detection rate of expressed genes and improved overlap with the expression signatures of isolated peripheral blood mononuclear (PBMC) preparations. The differentially modulated genes from the globin depleted samples had a higher correlation coefficient to the 112 genes identified to be significantly altered in our previous study on sickle-cell disease using PBMC preparations. Additionally, the analysis of differences between the whole blood transcriptome and PBMC transcriptome reveals important erythrocyte genes that participate in sickle-cell pathogenesis and compensation. The combination of globin mRNA reduction after whole-blood RNA stabilization represents a robust clinical research methodology for the discovery of biomarkers for hematologic diseases and in multicenter clinical trials investigating a wide range of nonhematologic disorders where fractionation of cell types is impracticable. Keywords: Microarrays, PAXgene, globin reduction, whole blood, PBMC There are 10 samples for each of PBMC, PAX and PAX globin-reduced, where 5 samples come from sickle-cell patients and 5 from healthy controls.

Project description:Microarray-based gene expression analysis of peripheral whole blood is a common strategy in the development of clinically relevant biomarker panels for a variety of human diseases. However, the results of such an analysis are often plagued by decreased sensitivity and reliability due to the effects of relatively high levels of globin mRNA in whole blood. Globin reduction assays have been shown to overcome such effects, but they require large amounts of total RNA and may induce distinct gene expression profiles. The Illumina whole-genome DASL (WG-DASL) assay can detect gene expression levels using partially degraded RNA samples and has the potential to detect rare transcripts present in highly heterogeneous whole blood samples without the need for globin reduction. We therefore assessed the utility of the WG-DASL assay in the analysis of peripheral whole blood gene expression profiles. We find that gene expression detection is significantly increased with the use of WG-DASL compared to the standard in vitro transcription-based direct hybridization (IVT), while globin-probe-negative WG-DASL did not exhibit significant improvements over globin-probe-positive WG-DASL. Globin reduction increases the detection sensitivity and reliability of both WG-DASL and IVT with little effect on raw intensity correlations: raw intensity correlations between total RNA and globin-reduced RNA were 0.970 for IVT and 0.981 for WG-DASL. Overall, the detection sensitivity of the WG-DASL assay is higher than the IVT-based direct hybridization assay, with or without globin reduction, and should be considered in conjunction with globin reduction methods for future blood-based gene expression studies. Peripheral whole blood samples were collected from eight human donors in PAXGene tubes. RNA was isolated after freezing and storage, and then prepared for gene expression analysis using the Illumina Human-Ref8 v3.0 BeadChip. Alpha and beta globin were reduced from a portion of the total RNA using the GLOBINclear assay (Ambion, Austin, TX, USA). Two methods of microarray target preparation were examined: Illumina IVT-based direct hybridization (IVT) and Illumina Whole-Genome DASL (WG-DASL). Two DASL Assay Oligo pools (DAP) were utilized for DASL target preparation: the DASL Assay Oligo Pool with globin probes (DAP +) and the DASL Asssay Oligo Pool without globin probes (DAP-).

Project description:Whole blood rather than purified peripheral blood mononuclear cells is likely to become the prime tissue using expression microarrays for disease predication or prognosis however excess of globin mRNA may reduce probe detection sensitivity. In our study, we assessed whether whole-blood or globin-reduced RNA gives the most robust and sensitive results to detect small gene expression changes in response to hormone replacement therapy exposure. Each sample (N = 12) were hybridized according to 3 different protocols: no globin reduction (controls), globin reduction using peptid nucleic acids (PNA) and using magnetic beads in the GlobinClear kit from Ambion. Finally, 7 and 4 technical replicates were conducted in no globin reduction and PNA groups, respectively. Both globin reduction approaches were mostly efficient at reducing globin RNA from cRNA. Samples processed by GlobinClear kit gave a very distinct gene expression profiles from the controls while samples processed with PNA gave an intermediary profile closest to the non globin reduction group with a slight increased sensitivity of transcript detection but a loss of reproducibility. Overall, no sign of higher sensitivity in detection of gene expression changes followed by hormone exposure was observed after globin reduction which was therefore judged not beneficial. Keywords: Groups comparaison To assess effect of globin reduction protocols on gene expression from whole-blood, we selected 12 postmenopausal women (6 HRT users and 6 non-HRT users) who were not using other medication than HRT at the time of blood sampling and in order to cover a wide body mass index (BMI) range in both HRT and non HRT users. The samples were also selected to contain the highest concentration of total extracted RNA. Each sample was hybridized according to 3 different protocols: no globin reduction (controls), globin reduction using PNAs, globin reduction using magnetic beads in the GlobinClear™ kit from Ambion. The reproducibility of the globin reduction method compared to the non globin reduction approach was investigated for the PNA method only since this method was the most effective and specific. We planned to conduct 7 technical replicates in each group (i.e. no globin reduction and PNA groups). During amplification process with PNA, 4 samples failed to reverse transcript long fragment of mRNA certainly due to inhibitory contamination and these arrays were therefore excluded from our analyses. One sample (sample 34) was amplified with PNA twice the same day to study technical reproducibility without amplification date effect. Finally, a total of 47 arrays were conducted including 7 and 4 technical replicates in no globin reduction and PNA group, respectively.

Project description:Peripheral blood is an accessible and informative source of transcriptomal information for many human disease and pharmacogenomic studies. While there can be significant advantages to analyzing RNA isolated from whole blood, particularly in clinical studies, the preparation of samples for microarray analysis is complicated by the need to minimize artifacts associated with highly abundant globin RNA transcripts. The impact of globin RNA transcripts on expression profiling data can potentially be reduced by using RNA preparation and labeling methods that remove or block globin RNA during the microarray assay. We compared four different methods for preparing microarray hybridization targets from human whole blood collected in PAXGene tubes. Three of the methods utilized the Affymetrix one-cycle cDNA synthesis/in vitro transcription protocol but varied treatment of input RNA as follows: i. no treatment; ii. treatment with GLOBINclear; or iii. treatment with globin PNA oligos. In the fourth method cDNA targets were prepared with the Ovation amplification and labeling system. Results: We find that microarray targets generated with labeling methods that reduce globin mRNA levels or minimize the impact of globin transcripts during hybridization detect more transcripts in the microarray assay compared with the standard Affymetrix method. Comparison of microarray results with quantitative PCR analysis of a panel of genes from the NF-kappa B pathway shows good correlation of transcript measurements produced with all four target preparation methods, although method-specific differences in overall correlation were observed. The impact of freezing blood collected in PAXGene tubes on data reproducibility was also examined. Expression profiles show little or no difference when RNA is extracted from either fresh or frozen blood samples. Conclusion: RNA preparation and labeling methods designed to reduce the impact of globin mRNA transcripts can significantly improve the sensitivity of the DNA microarray expression profiling assay for whole blood samples. While blockage of globin transcripts during first strand cDNA synthesis with globin PNAs resulted in the best overall performance in this study, we conclude that selection of a protocol for expression profiling studies in blood should depend on several factors, including implementation requirements of the method and study design. RNA isolated from either freshly collected or frozen blood samples stored in PAXGene tubes can be used without altering gene expression profiles. Keywords: Whole Blood, Protocol Variation, Expression Profiling, Microarray, globin, PAXGene, PNA

Dataset Information

The Effects of Globin on Microarray-based Gene Expression Analysis of Mouse Blood

Publications

The effects of globin on microarray-based gene expression analysis of mouse blood.

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