Tissue culture model of hypothermia

Therapeutic hypothermia is a clinically effective treatment for various hypoxic and ischemic conditions, but the associated molecular mechanisms remain unclear. To gain insight into hypothermia-induced transcriptional response, mouse embryonic fibroblasts were exposed to mild hypothermia (32°C) or normothermia (37°C) for increasing time periods. We aimed to identify genes with temporally near-monotonic response as the most obvious candidates for mediating the therapeutic effects of hypothermia. Hypothermia was compared against normothermia at seven different time-points. Hypothermic and normothermic mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF, in 100 mm dishes, one array per time-point) were submitted to gene expression analysis using Mouse Gene 1.0 ST GeneChip® (Affymetrix) microarrays. Differential gene expression analysis was performed with R package DEMI (http://biit.cs.ut.ee/demi/).