Human aldosterone producing cell clusters, zona glomerulosa, zona fasciculata, and zona reticularis, from adrenal glands

In order to analyze the transcriptome characteristics of aldosterone producing cell clusters (APCC) we compared transcript abundances of APCC, zona glomerulosa (ZG), zona fasciculata (ZF), and zona reticularis (ZR), from adrenal glands obtained from 4 kidney transplantation donors. The frozen adrenal glands in O.C.T. compound were cut into 7um sections, and every 10-th section immunostained for aldosterone synthase (CYP11B2). The remaining sections were stained with cresyl violet and used for laser-capture microdissection of tissue to use in the array assays. APCC and ZG samples were captured from CYP11B2 positive regions based on the CYP11B2-stained sections. ZF and ZR were captured from lipid-rich cells in the middle layer and compact cells outside of the medulla, respectively. RNA was isolated using PicoPure RNA isolation kits (Molecular Devices, Sunnyvale, CA). 1-10 ng total RNA was reverse-transcribed and amplified with the Ovation Pico WTA System V2 (NuGEN Technologies, San Carlos, CA). cDNA was purified using QIAquick PCR Purification Kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany) and biotin-labeled using Encore Biotin Module (NuGEN Technologies), followed by hybridization to GeneChip Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 Array (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA). Expression values were calculated using the robust multi-array average method (RMA). This resulted in base-2 log-transformed data for each of the 4 tissues from each of the 4 people. In addition to the raw and processed data we also supply a supplementary Excel file holding the data and some statistical analysis, which has features to make simple graphs, and holds probe-set annotation that we used at that time (users may wish to obtain new annotation though). We fit two-way ANOVA models with terms for 4 tissues and 4 people, and compared each probe-set between every pair of tissues using F-tests for pairwise contrasts. We modeled people effects since they were not negligible. The supplement shows how to calculate the tests.

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Nishimoto K, Tomlins SA, Kuick R, Cani AK, Giordano TJ, Hovelson DH, Liu CJ, Sanjanwala AR, Edwards MA, Gomez-Sanchez CE, Nanba K, Rainey WE