Gene expression profiles in Sirt1/PPARalpha bigenic mice

Cardiac-specific PPARalpha transgenic (Tg-PPARalpha) mice show mild cardiac hypertrophy and systolic dysfunction. The failing heart phenotypes observed in Tg-PPARalpha are exacerbated by crossing with cardiac-specific Sirt1 transgenic (Tg-Sirt1) mice, whereas Tg-Sirt1 mice themselves do not show any cardiac hypertrophy or systolic dysfunction. To investigate the mechanism leading to the failing heart phenotypes in TgPPARalpha/Tg-Sirt1 bigenic mice, microarray analyses were performed. The microarray analyses revealed that many ERR target genes were downregulated in Tg-PPARalpha and in Tg-Sirt1, and they were further downregulated in the Tg-PPARalpha/Tg-Sirt1 bigenic mice. Four groups of cardiac-specific transgenic mice were used for the study, i.e., control, PPARalpha, Sirt1 and PPARalpha/Sirt1. Hearts were dissected after 10-11 weeks of male FVB background transgenic mice. Total RNA was prepared from the hearts to conduct the microarray analyses.