Figure 2

HOX genes with significant differences between human AAA and control human abdominal aorta assayed by microarrays. Box-and-whisker plots of mRNA levels for the 10 classic HOX genes that had significantly (FDR <0.05) different expression levels between AAA cases (N = 6) and age-, sex-, and ethnicity-matched controls (N = 7) obtained from abdominal aorta. Results are based on microarray expression profiling which have been described previously [11] and details on the donors are described in Additional file 2, Table S2. RNA expression levels in signal intensity units are indicated on the ordinate-axis. Thick horizontal bars in the boxes indicate median values, boxes indicate interquartile range, whiskers indicate range of non-outlier values, and circles indicate outliers less than 3 interquartile range units. Gene symbols available from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) were used. For a full list of all HOX genes and their expression levels in human aorta, see Additional file 5, Table S4.