Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA 02118, USA.
Proc Am Thorac Soc. 2011 May;8(2):173-9. doi: 10.1513/pats.201011-066MS.
The "field of injury" hypothesis proposes that exposure to an inhaled insult such as cigarette smoke elicits a common molecular response throughout the respiratory tract. This response can therefore be quantified in any airway tissue, including readily accessible epithelial cells in the bronchus, nose, and mouth. High-throughput technologies, such as whole-genome gene expression microarrays, can be employed to catalog the physiological consequences of such exposures in the airway epithelium. Pulmonary diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, and asthma are also thought to be associated with a field of injury, and in patients with these diseases, airway epithelial cells can be a useful surrogate for diseased tissue that is often difficult to obtain. Global measurement of mRNA and microRNA expression in these cells can provide useful information about the molecular pathogenesis of such diseases and may be useful for diagnosis and for predicting prognosis and response to therapy. In this review, our aim is to summarize the history and state of the art of such "transcriptomic" studies in the human airway epithelium, especially in smoking and smoking-related lung diseases, and to highlight future directions for this field.
“损伤场”假说提出，暴露于吸入性刺激物（如香烟烟雾）会在整个呼吸道引发共同的分子反应。因此，这种反应可以在任何气道组织中进行定量分析，包括支气管、鼻腔和口腔中易于获取的上皮细胞。高通量技术，如全基因组基因表达微阵列，可以用于对气道上皮细胞暴露于这些物质后的生理后果进行编目。慢性阻塞性肺疾病、肺癌和哮喘等肺部疾病也被认为与损伤场有关，在这些疾病患者中，气道上皮细胞可以作为一种有用的替代物，用于研究通常难以获得的病变组织。对这些细胞中 mRNA 和 microRNA 表达的全面测量可以为这些疾病的分子发病机制提供有用信息，并可能有助于诊断以及预测预后和对治疗的反应。在这篇综述中，我们的目的是总结人类气道上皮细胞转录组学研究的历史和现状，特别是在吸烟和与吸烟相关的肺部疾病方面，并强调该领域的未来方向。
