Comparison of longitudinal leukocyte gene expression after burn injury or trauma-hemorrhage in mice

A primary objective of the large collaborative project entitled "Inflammation and the Host Response to Injury" was to identify leukocyte genes that are differentially expressed after two different types of injury in mouse models and to test the hypothesis that both forms of injury would induce similar changes in gene expression. We report here the genes that are expressed in white blood cells (WBCs) and in splenocytes at 2 h, 1 day, 3 days, and 7 days after burn and sham injury or trauma-hemorrhage (T-H) and sham T-H. Affymetrix Mouse Genome 430 2.0 GeneChips were used to profile gene expression, and the results were analyzed by dCHIP, BRB Array Tools, and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) software. We found that the highest number of genes differentially expressed following burn injury were at day 1 for both WBCs (4,989) and for splenocytes (4,715) and at day 1 for WBCs (1,167) and at day 3 for splenocytes (1,117) following T-H. The maximum overlap of genes that were expressed after both forms of injury were at day 1 in WBCs (136 genes) and at day 7 in splenocytes (433 genes). IPA revealed that the cell-to-cell signaling, cell death, immune response, antiapoptosis, and cell cycle control pathways were affected most significantly. In summary, this report provides a database of genes that are modulated in WBCs and splenocytes at sequential time points after burn or T-H in mice and reveals that relatively few leukocyte genes are expressed in common after these two forms of injury.