Figure 1.

Overview of the experimental design. We used spotted membrane DNA arrays to characterize gene expression from MFS samples with known FBN1 mutations and from unaffected control samples. Following analysis of both groups, we selected a set of genes for validation by qRT-PCR, using a majority of the original samples. A new population of 16 probable MFS, all with an aortic phenotype, and 16 UC samples were used to test independently whether the selected genes were differentially expressed between the two groups. See Table 1 for details about subjects included in each experiment.