Beyond Gene Identification: Investigating Relationships Between Microarray Gene Expression Levels and Rheometric Measurements

• Activity Number: 111
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 12, 2002 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section*
• Author(s): David Whiting*+ and Bruce Schaalje and Susan Thibeault and Sarah Klemuk
• Affiliation(s): Brigham Young University and Brigham Young University and University of Utah and University of Iowa
• Keywords: microarray ; rheometric ; gene expression

Abstract

We are involved in a medical study investigating the genetic factors responsible for the occurrence and severity of scarring. For 19 patients, replicated gene expression microarrays of healthy and scar tissue were generated using a dye-flip protocol. Additionally, rheometric and other physiological measurements (e.g., tissue elasticity, scar thickness, scar type, etc.) were taken on both healthy and scar tissues.

The identification of genes which play a role in scarring is a first step in this study. However, our primary interest is to relate levels of expression of the involved genes with the physiological measurements. We will address the fitting of a predictive model with gene expression levels as predictors. This modeling effort is complicated by measurement error, the multivariate nature of the response variables, and computational issues related to the large amount of data.