Transcriptome profiling of responses of mouse peritoneal macrophages to oxLDL

The goal of this study was to profile transcriptional changes of mouse peritoneal macrophages during foam cell formation induced by the atherogenic lipoprotein, oxidized LDL (oxLDL) Resident peritoneal macrophages were isolated from female C57BL/6J mice at 8-12 weeks of age, by intraperitoneal lavage, and purified by triple-washing to retain adherent cells. Macrophages were incubated with either 25 ug/mL CuSO4-oxidized human LDL (or vehicle) for 24 h, and then total RNA was isolated using TRIzol. Microarray profiling was carried out using the Affymetrix Mouse Exon Array 1.0 ST GeneChip and analyzed using the Affymetrix algorithms PLIER and DABG, using transcript-level and exon-level probesets from the CustomCDF project that were based on Ensembl transcript/exon definitions. Differential expression testing was performed using Limma.