Gene expression analysis in gut biopsies of Crohn's Disease patients and patients with Spondylarthropathy

A focussed microarray chip was constructed specifically for studying basal colonic gene expression in patients with Spondyloarthropathy (SpA) and Crohn's disease (CD) (ref: PMID 16476712). These focus microarrays were used 1) to study common changes in gene expression between SpA and CD, providing early markers in the follow-up study of patients with SpA and particularly these patients that evolve into clinically overt CD; and 2) to identify new candidate genes for CD by integrating gene expression data with genetic information. Keywords: Crohn's Disease, Spondylarthropathy, biopsies This experiment was done in a dye-swap design in which all samples of interest were compared to a pooled sample.