Microarray-based gene expression on human aortic valves

Aortic valves are collected from patients with severe aortic valve stenosis undergoing aortic valve replacement at the Institut universitaire de cardiologie et de pneumologie de Québec (IUCPQ), Quebec City, Canada. From this biobank collection, transcriptomic analyses from 240 aortic valves were performed. All valves were tricuspid and had a fibro-calcific remodeling score of 3 or 4. RNA was extracted from valve leaflets and gene expression evaluated using the Illumina HumanHT-12 v4 Expression BeadChip. The main objective of this study was to perform a large-scale expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) mapping study on human aortic valves. Whole-genome gene expression was performed in 240 human aortic valves.