Microarray analyses of genes regulated by isoflurane anesthesia in vivo: a novel approach to identifying potential preconditioning mechanisms.

Background While general anesthetics are recognized for their potential to render patients unconscious during surgery, exposure can also lead to long-term outcomes of both cellular damage and protection. As regards the latter, delayed anesthetic preconditioning is an evolutionarily conserved physiological response that has the potential for protecting against ischemic injury in a number of tissues. While it is known that delayed preconditioning requires de novo protein synthesis, knowledge of anesthetic-regulated genes is incomplete. In this study we used the conserved nature of preconditioning to analyze differentially regulated genes in three different rat tissues. We hypothesized that by selecting those genes regulated in multiple tissues, we could develop a focused list of gene candidates potentially involved in delayed anesthetic preconditioning.