Expression data from mouse optic nerve head after elevation in intraocular pressure

Reactive astrocytes are typically studied in models that cause irreversible mechanical damage to axons, neuronal cell bodies, and glia. We evaluated the response of astrocytes in the optic nerve head to a subtle injury induced by a brief, mild elevation of the intraocular pressure. Astrocytes demonstrated reactive remodeling showing hypertrophy, process retraction and simplification of their shape. We used microarray to indentify differentially expressed genes and to investigate the molecular mechanisms of astrogliosis in response to this subtle injury. Six- to eight-week old C57Bl/6 male mice were used in this experiment. One eye underwent an elevation in intraocular pressure to 30 mmHg for 1 hour and then allowed to recover for 3 days. The contralateral eye served as a control. Due to the small tissue size of the mouse optic nerve head, two optic nerve heads were pooled together for each microarray chip. We used 10 mice to generate five biological replicates for each condition.