Gene Expression Profiles in Asbestos-exposed Epithelial and Mesothelial Lung Cell Lines
Penny Nymark1,2, Pamela M Lindholm2, Mikko V Korpela3,
Leo Lahti3, Salla Ruosaari1,2,3, Samuel Kaski3,
Jaakko Hollmén3, Sisko Anttila1, Vuokko L Kinnula4
and Sakari Knuutila2
1Health and Work Ability, Biological Mechanisms and Prevention of
Work-related Diseases, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki,
Finland
2Department of Pathology, Haartman Institute and HUSLAB, University
of Helsinki and Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland
3Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Laboratory of
Computer and Information Science, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo,
Finland
4Department of Medicine, Pulmonary Division, University of Helsinki
and Helsinki University Hospital, Helsinki, Finland
BMC Genomics 2007
An open access research article
Published: 1 March 2007
Abstract
Background
Asbestos has been shown to cause chromosomal damage and DNA aberrations.
Exposure to asbestos causes many lung diseases e.g. asbestosis, malignant
mesothelioma, and lung cancer, but the disease-related processes are still
largely unknown. We exposed the human cell lines A549, Beas-2B and Met5A to
crocidolite asbestos and determined time-dependent gene expression profiles by
using Affymetrix arrays. The hybridization data was analyzed by using an
algorithm specifically designed for clustering of short time series expression
data. A canonical correlation analysis was applied to identify correlations
between the cell lines, and a Gene Ontology analysis method for the
identification of enriched, differentially expressed biological processes.
Results
We recognized a large number of previously known as well as new potential
asbestos-associated genes and biological processes, and identified chromosomal
regions enriched with genes potentially contributing to common responses to
asbestos in these cell lines. These include genes such as the thioredoxin domain
containing gene (TXNDC) and the potential tumor suppressor, BCL2/adenovirus E1B
19kD-interacting protein gene (BNIP3L), GO-terms such as "positive regulation of
I-kappaB kinase/NF-kappaB cascade" and "positive regulation of transcription,
DNA-dependent", and chromosomal regions such as 2p22, 9p13, and 14q21. We
present the complete data sets as Additional files.
Conclusion
This study identifies several interesting targets for further investigation in
relation to asbestos-associated diseases.
The complete article is available in
PDF format.
The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found
online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/8/62
BMC Genomics 2007, 8:62doi:10.1186/1471-2164-8-62
© 2007 Nymark et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.

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