Gene expression profiling of liver injury during human orthotopic liver transplantation.

The purpose of this study was to identify the main genes involved in liver I/R using a transcriptomic approach. Keywords: Normal vs transplanted human liver comparison, stress response, clinical analysis. Twenty one liver transplant biopsies (sample= T1-T21) taken after graft reperfusion were compared with 7 normal control livers (sample= control1-control7). Transplanted samples are divided into two groups based on the peak levels of serum aspartate amino transferase (AST) in the patient serum and the histologic score of the biopsy (suzuki score): group 1 (14 patients, ALT=1500 U/l), mild to moderate injury; group 2, (7 patients, AST>1500 U/l) severe injury. Control samples include 5 liver biopsies from patients undergoing tumour surgical resection and 2 commercial RNA from Stratagene. Two technical replicates were performed for each transplanted and normal patient inverting cye dye (dye-swap), and 6 replicates were carried out for commercial RNA (3 cy3 and 3 cy5 for each). This experimental design involves 32 slides.