ABSTRACT
Hypertension is a prevalent disease and is one of the leading risk factors for end organ damage.1 Elucidation of the molecular mechanisms underlying the maintenance of elevated blood pressure and the associated increase in cardiovascular risk should greatly enhance the search for therapeutic agents for this disease. Microarray technology permits the simultaneous measurement of thousands of mRNA transcripts, and has proven to be an invaluable resource in the study of biological systems, particularly in the area of cancer research.2 Recent technological advances in microarray chip design now allow expression of almost all genes to be assessed in a single hybridization experiment. By examining the global gene expression changes occurring during various physiological perturbations or in disease models we can begin to form an integrative view of transcriptional regulation in a particular cell type or tissue. Moreover, due to the highly parallel nature of the microarray experiment, its use as an initial screening step combined with appropriate prioritization algorithms will lead to the more rapid identification of critical genes and pathways than could be achieved by examining genes one by one.
