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Original Research ARTICLE

To what extent is blood a reasonable surrogate for brain in gene expression studies: estimation from mouse hippocampus and spleen

Matthew N. Davies¹*, Sarah Lawn¹, Steven Whatley², Cathy Fernandes¹, Robert W. Williams³ and Leonard C. Schalkwyk¹

Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, UK

Department of Neuroscience, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, UK

University of Tennessee Medical School, Memphis, TN, USA

Microarrays are designed to measure genome-wide differences in gene expression. In cases where a tissue is not accessible for analysis (e.g. human brain), it is of interest to determine whether a second, accessible tissue could be used as a surrogate for transcription profiling. Surrogacy has applications in the study of behavioural and neurodegenerative disorders. Comparison between hippocampus and spleen mRNA obtained from a mouse recombinant inbred panel indicates a high degree of correlation between the tissues for genes that display a high heritability of expression level. This correlation is not limited to apparent expression differences caused by sequence polymorphisms in the target sequences and includes both cis and trans genetic effects. A tissue such as blood could therefore give surrogate information on expression in brain for a subset of genes, in particular those co-expressed between the two tissues, which have heritably varying expression.

Keywords:

hippocampus, spleen, recombinant inbred strain, gene expression, surrogacy

Citation:

Davies MN, Lawn S, Whatley S, Fernandes C, Williams RW and Schalkwyk LC (2009). To what extent is blood a reasonable surrogate for brain in gene expression studies: estimation from mouse hippocampus and spleen. Front. Neurosci. 3:54. doi: 10.3389/neuro.15.002.2009

This article was submitted to Frontiers in Neurogenomics, a specialty of Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Received:

12 June 2009;

Paper pending published:

29 June 2009;

Accepted:

17 September 2009;

Published online:

09 October 2009.

Edited by:

Gerd Kempermann, Center for Regenerative Therapies, Germany

Reviewed by:

Andreas Beyer, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
Gerald De Haan, University Medical Center Groningen, Netherlands

© 2009 Davies, Lawn, Whatley, Fernandes, Williams and Schalkwyk. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Matthew N. Davies, Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London SE5 8AF, UK. e-mail: matthew.davies@iop.kcl.ac.uk