Genome-wide expression studies of atherosclerosis: Critical issues in methodology, analysis, interpretation of transcriptomics data

During the past 6 years, gene expression profiling of atherosclerosis has been used to identify genes and pathways relevant in vascular (patho)physiology. This review discusses some critical issues in the methodology, analysis, and interpretation of the data of gene expression studies that have made use of vascular specimens from animal models and humans. Analysis of gene expression studies has evolved toward the genome-wide expression profiling of large series of individual samples of well-characterized donors. Despite the advances in statistical and bioinformatical analysis of expression data sets, studies have not yet fully exploited the potential of gene expression data sets to obtain novel insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying atherosclerosis. To assess the potential of published expression data, we compared the data of a CC chemokine gene cluster between 18 murine and human gene expression profiling articles. Our analysis revealed that an adequate comparison is mainly hindered by the incompleteness of available data sets. The challenge for future vascular genomic profiling studies will be to further improve the experimental design, statistical, and bioinformatical analysis and to make data sets freely accessible.