Endogenous brain protection: What the cerebral transcriptome teaches us

Microarray technology is a great tool for investigating large scale gene expression, and has been used in many experimental studies of cerebral ischemia and preconditioning to unravel molecular (patho-) physiology. However, the amount of data across microarray studies can be daunting and hard to interpret which is why we aim to provide a clear overview of available data in experimental rodent models. Findings for both injurious ischemia and preconditioning are reviewed under separate subtopics such as cellular stress, inflammation, cytoskeleton and cell signaling. Finally, we investigated the transcriptome signature of brain protection across preconditioning studies in search of transcripts that were expressed similarly across studies. Strikingly, when comparing genes discovered by single-gene analysis we observed only 15 genes present in two studies or more. We subjected these 15 transcripts to DAVID Annotation Clustering analysis to derive their shared biological meaning. Interestingly, the MAPK signaling pathway and more specifically the ERK1/2 pathway geared toward cell survival/proliferation was significantly enriched. To conclude, we advocate incorporating pathway analysis into all microarray data analysis in order to improve the detection of similarities between independently derived datasets.