AUTHOR=Davies Matthew N., Lawn Sarah , Whatley Steven , Fernandes Cathy , Williams Robert W., Schalkwyk Leonard C.

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

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 3 - 2009

YEAR=2009

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/neuro.15.002.2009

DOI=10.3389/neuro.15.002.2009

ISSN=1662-453X

ABSTRACT=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.