Cross Species Analysis of Myocardial Susceptibility to Perioperative Stress

The research objectives and research design of the overall project are described in the main application from Duke University, Mihai Podgoreanu, PI. The portion of the project to be carried out at the University of Washington relate to the processing and statistical analysis of the data generated at Duke University. The main objectives of this work are: Participate in the design of the micro-array experiments. Perform quality checks, preprocessing and exploratory analysis of the data. Make use of state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools to combine the gene expression data across species and to identify orthologous genes between human and model organisms. Develop predictive statistical models for PMI in order to identify relevant sets of genes for further study. Develop statistical techniques customized to the needs of this project that perform cross-species data mining. Create and visualize genome-wide association networks from micro-array data and assess their biological relevance with respect to corresponding networks from Ingenuity Pathways Analysis and Duke Integrated Genomics. Closely collaborate with the Duke investigators to understand, refine and validate the predictive models for "perioperative myocardial injury" (PMI). Develop a web-based resource for this project summarizing the up-to-date progress of the team. Make public the findings of the project through conference talks and research articles.