Molecular alterations following myocardial infarction in mice. Mus musculus

Background and Aims: It is known that inflammatory processes are activated in heart failure, but the regulation of cytokines and their role in the pathogenesis of the disease are not well understood. To address this issue, we have performed microarray analysis of non-infarcted left ventricular tissue from mice at various time-points after myocardial infarction. Methods: Molecular alterations in myocardial tissue were measured 3, 5, 7 and 14 days after induced infarction by using cDNA microarrays. Sham operated mice served as controls. Altered gene transcriptions were verified by real-time polymerase chain reaction. Attention focused on genes encoding cytokines which had not previously been assigned a role in heart failure development. Results: The highest number of regulated genes was found at day 5 post myocardial infarction, and 22 genes encoding cytokines were identified as being regulated. Several of the identified genes encoding cytokines have not previously been associated with HF, and among those fractalkine showed strongest up-regulation. Keywords: Disease state analysis, time course Overall design: A time-serie where 4 male sham mice or post infarction mice were sacrificed at time-points 3,5,7 and 14 days after surgery. Including one dye-swap there were a total of 5 arrays at each time-point.