Balloon injury-induced gene expression in common carotid arteries of wistar rat

The whole rat genome microarray expression profiling of carotid artery specimen was emplyed to identify the gene expression profile before and after balloon injury. In our study, the neointimal formation of carotid arteries was apparent at day 7 and markedly increased at day 21 after balloon injury. In order to investigate the underlying mechanism of neointimal formationin in injured carotid arteries, all genes involved in signaling pathways whose expression was altered 2-fold in injured carotid arteries at day 7 and day 21 as compared to uninjured arteries were filtered out. Expression of four genes (TLR4, IRAK1, I¿Ba, IL-1ß) from TLR signaling pathway was quantified in the same RNA samples by quantitative real-time PCR, conforming that TLR signaling pathway participated in neointimal formation of carotid arteries after balloon injury.本研究通过大鼠全基因组微阵列表达谱技术分析颈动脉标本，旨在明确球囊损伤前后的基因表达谱特征。研究结果表明，颈动脉新内膜形成在球囊损伤后第7天即可见，至第21天时显著加重。为探究损伤颈动脉新内膜形成的潜在分子机制，本研究筛选出与信号通路相关、且在损伤后第7天和第21天的颈动脉标本中，相较于未损伤组表达变化幅度达2倍的全部基因。此外，本研究采用实时定量聚合酶链式反应（qRT-PCR），对同批次RNA样本中Toll样受体（TLR）信号通路相关的4个基因（TLR4、IRAK1、IκBα、IL-1β）的表达水平进行定量检测，结果证实TLR信号通路参与了球囊损伤后颈动脉的新内膜形成过程。