This book presents both cutting-edge and established methods for studying cardiac gene expression. The protocols provide a template for solid research, and cover the process through screening, analysis, characterization, and functional confirmation of novel genes or known genes with a new function. The concluding section of the book highlights methods that facilitate overexpression or cardiac-specific targeted gene deletion.

The past decade has ushered in enormous changes in how we perceive and study changes in gene expression in the heart. Early in the 1990s, the human genome project was just getting underway and establishing methods with the sensitivity to measure changes in the expression of genes with low copy number was an accomplishment. We all experienced some trepidation when the first news of microarrays arrived espousing the ability to measure changes in expression of hundreds to tens of thousands of genes (the whole genome) at once. This high throughput method was an astonishing jump in our approach to biological science. At the same time Steve Fodor and Pat Brown published papers describing two completely different approaches to measuring the expression changes of large numbers of genes at the same time. Thus began the microarray era and as a consequence the beginning of an era with a host of new approaches in pursuit of understanding the role and regulation of gene expression in cell biology and pathology including driving forward the field of bioinformatics.