A total of 1 µg of mRNA extracted from each tissue sample was amplified to fluorescently labeled cRNA, and profiled by the Rosetta Gene Expression Laboratory in two phases using the Rosetta/Merck 44k 1.1 microarray (GPL4372) (Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA) [27]. The average RNA integrity number of 6.81 was sufficiently high for the microarray experiment monitoring 40,638 transcripts representing more than 31,000 unique genes. The expression levels were processed and normalized to the average of all samples in the batch from the same region using Rosetta Resolver (Rosetta Biosoftware, Seattle, WA).
