Determining the impact of Vitamin E & Selenium supplementation on gene expression in the brains of mice infected with T. gondii

Previous studies have shown that dietary supplementation with antioxidants is harmful during murine infection with the protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. In both Swiss Webster and C57BL/6 mice, supplementation with vitamin E and selenium resulted in an increased number of tissue cysts, tissue pathology, and weight loss during T. gondii infection (McCarthy & Davis, 2003). Microarrays are used widely these days to determine the significant genes in experimental models [3]. Various methods are implemented for analyzing the microarray data. Normalization is usually required on raw intensities obtained from microarray for variance stabilization. This normalized data will further require some statistical tests for determining genes with significant difference. The overall goal of the present study was to determine the impact of Vitamin E & Selenium supplementation on gene expression in the brains of mice infected with T. gondii with an Microarray analysis.