Arraying the Orchestration of Allograft Pathology

Microarrays, or gene chips, are exciting investigative tools for analyzing expression changes across thousands of genes in concert in tissues and cells of interest. Despite the relatively recent application of microarrays to transplant research, they hold great promise for unraveling the staging of rejection, stratifying patients towards more individualized treatment regimes, and discovering noninvasive biomarkers for monitoring of intragraft events. Bioinformatics tools are being developed to sift through the large data sets generated as ‘genomic fingerprints’ of the underlying biologic pathways. Gene clustering and class prediction tools allow discovery of diagnostic and prognostic molecular signatures of health and disease. Oligonucleotide-based microarrays also have utility in genotyping polymorphic markers. This report reviews the current literature of microarray use in transplantation research, compares currently available array platforms, and discusses future application of this technology to clinical organ transplantation.