Global gene expression analysis in pulmonary fibrosis resistant (FR) and prone (FP) mouse strains after radiation treatment

Full text: Lung injury such as pneumonitis and pulmonary fibrosis, is a common side effect of multimodal cancer treatment, especially after simultaneous application of high doses of radiation to the thorax and radiosensitising drugs. Previously we showed that individual variation in susceptibility to radiation-induced pulmonary fibrosis is genetically controlled with two significant linkage regions on chromosome 1 and chromosome 17. In the current studies, we performed global gene expression at one month after 16 Gy to FR (C3) and FP (B6) strain of mice using Affymetrix GeneChip 5.0 software by random pairwise comparisons of non-treated and treated B6 and C3 mice. Only those genes with at least 66% concordance among all possible pairwise comparisons and at least one two-fold increase or decrease were selected for radiation-induced differential expression analysis between the two strains. Our results showed that some genes such as TFF2, p21, plasminogen activator, chemokine receptors, interleukin receptor, etc. were differentially expressed between B6 and C3 mice without radiation treatment, while other genes such as DNA repair proteins, Vegf, extracellular