Ischemic postconditioning alters the gene expression pattern of the ischemic heart.

To profile changes in gene expression in response to ischemic postconditioning, isolated rat hearts were subjected to 30 min of regional ischemia followed by 120 min of reperfusion with or without postconditioning. At the end of reperfusion, cardiac RNA was assayed by DNA microarrays (31,000 format), verified by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (QRT-PCR). Postconditioning significantly up-regulated 50 genes and down-regulated 58 different genes, including pyruvate dehydrogenase, 60 kDa heat shock protein 1, lipoprotein lipase, gamma-sarcoglycan, and phospholipase C. Gene ontology analysis revealed that most of the altered genes belong to the cellular metabolic processes cluster. Many of the genes have not previously been suspected to be involved in the mechanism of postconditioning.