ABSTRACT
Disturbances in lipid metabolism, lipid-dependent cellular processes, and lipid-mediated signal transduction pathways have been implicated in a number of human brain disorders, including multiple sclerosis (MS),[1] Alzheimer’s disease (AD),[2,3] Down’s syndrome,[4] Niemann-Pick type C disease,[5] and perhaps even schizophrenia[6 – 12] and drug abuse.[13 – 18] This chapter will discuss representative human brain disorders in which microarrays have been employed to analyze the underlying pathophysiology from a transcriptional per-spective. Although this chapter is focused mainly on the postmortem analysis of human tissue, we will also consider studies in whole animals, primary cell cultures, and cell lines to show how these can be employed in a complementary manner to study human disorders.
