A meta-analysis study of gene expression datasets in mouse liver under PPARα knockout

Gene expression profiling of peroxisome-proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPAR alpha) has been used in several studies, but there were no consistent results on gene expression patterns involved in PPAR alpha activation in genome-wide due to different sample sizes or platforms. Here, we employed two published microarray datasets both PPAR alpha dependent in mouse liver and applied meta-analysis on them to increase the power of the identification of differentially expressed genes and significantly enriched pathways. As a result, we have improved the concordance in identifying many biological mechanisms involved in PPAR alpha activation. We suggest that our analysis not only leads to more identified genes by combining datasets from different resources together, but also provides some novel hepatic tissue-specific marker genes related to PPAR alpha according to our re-analysis.