High-Throughput Imaging of Brain Gene Expression
- Vanessa M. Brown1,2,
- Alex Ossadtchi3,
- Arshad H. Khan1,2,
- Simon R. Cherry1,2,4,
- Richard M. Leahy3, and
- Desmond J. Smith1,2,5
- 1Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, 2Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging, School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA; 3Department of Electrical Engineering, Signal and Image Processing Institute, School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA
Abstract
Voxelation is a new method for acquisition of three dimensional (3D) gene expression patterns in the brain. It employs high-throughput analysis of spatially registered voxels (cubes) to produce multiple volumetric maps of gene expression analogous to the images reconstructed in biomedical imaging systems. Using microarrays, 24 voxel images of coronal hemisections at the level of the hippocampus of both the normal human brain and Alzheimer's disease brain were acquired for 2000 genes. The analysis revealed a common network of coregulated genes, and allowed identification of putative control regions. In addition, singular value decomposition (SVD), a mathematical method used to provide economical explanations of complex data sets, produced images that distinguished between brain structures, including cortex, caudate, and hippocampus. The results suggest that voxelation will be a useful approach for understanding how the genome constructs the brain.
[All study results are available as a web supplement athttp://www.pharmacology.ucla.edu/smithlab/genome_research_data and at http://www.genome.org.]
Footnotes
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↵4 Present address: Department of Biomedical Engineering, One Shields Ave, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
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↵5 Corresponding author.
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E-MAIL DSmith{at}mednet.ucla.edu; FAX (310) 825-6267.
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Article and publication are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.204102.
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- Received July 6, 2001.
- Accepted October 26, 2001.
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
