RNA isolated from the same aortic tissue used for the microarray was converted to cDNA using the High Capacity cDNA Synthesis Kit (Life Technologies).
Five micrograms of total RNA from each cell line profiled by Affymetrix microarrays was converted to cDNA using an ABI High Capacity cDNA Archive Kit (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA).
Probesets identification numbers in the fruit fly and mouse microarrays were converted to the corresponding gene symbol and matched across species using the HomoloGene database from NCBI.
In each species, probe sets of microarrays were converted into gene loci with reference to support documents from Affymetrix website (June 2012).
After the Arabidopsis EST-based microarray data were converted into Affymetrix 22 K array annotation, the 6,109 genes on the arrays were subjected to pathway construction using the MapMan platform [ 50].
The fold change output for each gene between shGR-19 and EV-50 from the microarray data was converted to relative expression by taking the base-2 logarithm of the absolute fold change and setting this value as the negative exponent of 2. The relative expression values for each gene between shGR-19 and EV-50 in the qRT-PCR were obtained directly during the experimental analysis (ΔΔ Ct method).
Microarray expression analysis was performed at the Newcastle University microarray facility; RNA was converted into biotin-labelled cRNA and hybridised to the Human U133A array according to manufacturer's protocols (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA, USA).
The microarray image data were converted to numerical data with GeneChip Operating Software (GCOS version 1.2.1.001; Affymetrix) using a probe set target signal of 125.
Before applying the SubMap, each microarray probe ID was converted into its corresponding HUGO gene symbol (http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/nomenclature/), and multiple probe data corresponding to a single gene symbol was averaged.
The microarray image information was converted into spot intensity values using Scanner Control Software Rev. 7.0 (Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA).
