Study of the activated macrophage transcriptome

Transcriptome analysis is a powerful modern tool to study possible alterations of gene expression associated with human diseases. It turns out to be especially promising for evaluation of gene expression changes in immunopathology, as immune cells have flexible gene expression patterns that can be switched in response to infection, inflammatory stimuli and exposure to various cytokines. In particular, macrophage polarization towards pro-inflammatory (M1) and anti-inflammatory (M2) phenotypes can be successfully studied using the modern transcriptome analysis approaches. The two mostly used techniques for transcriptome analysis are microarray and next generation sequencing. In this review we will provide an overview of known gene expression changes associated with immunopathology and discuss the advantage and limitations of different methods of transcriptome analysis.