Gene profile in fetal human heart and brain

To describe normal cardiac and brain development during late first and early second trimester in human fetuses using microarray and pathways analysis and the creation of a corresponding “normal” database. RNA from recovered tissues was used for transcriptome analysis with Affymetrix 1.0 ST microarray chip. From the amassed data we investigated differences in cardiac and brain development within the 10-18 GA period dividing the sample by GA in three groups: 10-12 (H1), 13-15(H2) and 16-18(H3) weeks. A fold change of 2 or above adjusted for a false discovery rate of 5% was used as initial cut-off to determine differential gene expression for individual genes. Test for enrichment to identify functional groups were carried out using the Gene Ontology (GO) and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). Array analysis correctly identified the cardiac specific genes, and transcripts reported to be differentially expressed were confirmed by qRT-PCR. 14 hearts-10 brains