Expression Profiling of the Cerebral Ischemic and Hypoxic Response

In mammals, the major component in energy production is molecular oxygen. This has led to the development of several elaborate strategies that tightly regulate oxygen homeostasis in order to allow appropriate cell function and survival. However, a sustained drop in oxygen supply to neuronal tissue has detrimental consequences to cell functioning and survival. Disturbances in oxygen supply have been implicated in a number of CNS disorders that can be related to hypoxia or ischemia. On a cellular level, oxygen-deprived stress induces a multitude of spatially and temporally regulated responses, ranging from adapted channel activity to altered gene expression. Global analysis of expression changes over several time points and tissue regions or cells has already shed light on previous known and unknown biological processes and molecules. By combining knowledge from several different expression-profiling studies into one database, the first steps are made in unifying and categorizing the molecular response to oxygen-deprived conditions, such as stroke. In this review, some of the queries that can be extracted from the database are discussed in regard to the biological context.