Nevins Joseph R, Potti Anil
Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA.
Nat Rev Genet. 2007 Aug;8(8):601-9. doi: 10.1038/nrg2137. Epub 2007 Jul 3.
Many examples highlight the power of gene expression profiles, or signatures, to inform an understanding of biological phenotypes. This is perhaps best seen in the context of cancer, where expression signatures have tremendous power to identify new subtypes and to predict clinical outcomes. Although the ability to interpret the meaning of the individual genes in these signatures remains a challenge, this does not diminish the power of the signature to characterize biological states. The use of these signatures as surrogate phenotypes has been particularly important, linking diverse experimental systems that dissect the complexity of biological systems with the in vivo setting in a way that was not previously feasible.
许多实例都凸显了基因表达谱或特征在助力理解生物学表型方面的强大作用。这一点在癌症领域或许体现得最为明显，在该领域中，表达特征对于识别新的亚型以及预测临床结果具有巨大的作用。尽管解读这些特征中单个基因的意义仍是一项挑战，但这并不削弱特征在表征生物学状态方面的作用。将这些特征用作替代表型尤为重要，它以一种此前无法实现的方式，将剖析生物系统复杂性的多种实验系统与体内环境联系起来。
