How does gene expression profiling work?
In brief, the idea is to see the forest for the trees. We have discovered that only about 3 percent of the human genome actually codes for some 25,000 genes that build specific proteins. How do you find which genes are on and which are off in cells? Even more importantly for clinicians, how does this affect the function of that cell? Specifically? We create small “chips” made of DNA fragments representing most of the genes in the human genome. In our new normal sample database, this means nearly 19,000 genes. Scientists then label the genes they are studying with fluorescence, and the DNA from those cells finds its match on the chip and lights it up. We know which gene it is because we built the coordinates of the chip map. Once you have a target organ or disease, you look for active genes with unusual expression profiles. We’ve built artificial neural networks that actually have “learned” to predict, correlating profiles to disease outcome better than the clinicians could. Where do yo
