Figure 6

Connective tissue associated signalling network common to various cardiac hypertrophy animal models and human cardiac disease. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis software was used to identify a signalling network associated with connective tissue disease, overlaid with average expression data common to various animal models of cardiac hypertrophy and human cardiac diseases. Pathway Builder was then used to create a signalling pathway, based on the Ingenuity signalling network, Biocarta's pathway database, and literature-based associations. TGF-β, which was not identified using microarrays but might nonetheless play a non-transcriptional role in heart disease, is shown as a plausible commonly activated pathway in the human failing heart and various animal models of cardiac hypertrophy. Also shown are the various extracellular matrix proteins that were transcriptionally up-regulated in animal models and human disease, based on microarrays. Signalling pathways associated with commonly down-regulated transcripts (e.g., AT1-R and EGFR) are also shown.