The Immune Response in Patients with SARS: differential gene expression profiling

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in 2003, as a new epidemic form of life-threatening infection. As of 26th September 2003, there were 8422 cases of SARS from 29 countries with 908 deaths (WHO). However, the pathogenesis of SARS is poorly understood. To understand the host response to this pathogen, we profiled the gene expression patterns of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from SARS patients compared to healthy controls using one of the latest techniques, high density oligonucleotide expression probe array (HG-Focus array, Gene Chip, Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA). High-density oligonucleotide microarray is a promising approach for high throughput analysis. It has been extensivelyused in many areas of biomedical research for different purposes. Thus we could compare the expression levels of thousands of genes which are differentially expressed in SARS patients over healthy controls. Among the most prominent findings, we observed 2 to 200-fold increased expression of transcripts of various genes. This enabled us to classify and cluster genes by functional families as well as to understand known genes in signalingpathways.