Preliminary selection of genes exhibiting deviant expression levels in <i>hand</i>^<i>173</i> animals.

By screening the microarray dataset for factors that are either significantly expressed in heart tissue or involved in muscle or heart development, maintenance or function, we identified 42 genes of potentially high physiological relevance. While 2 of these genes are upregulated in hand173, 40 display a reduced expression in the same line, compared to wild type. Functional classification of the corresponding protein products was done manually utilizing data from NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and Flybase (http://flybase.org/). Factors with yet unknown physiological functions are allocated to the category “assorted other”.