Ascertaining ROS- and hypertension-related genes
The SciMiner [8] web-based literature mining tool was used to obtain gene sets associated with ROS and hypertension. SciMiner was run on a query of "Reactive Oxygen Species" [MeSH] AND "Hypertension" [MeSH], identifying ROS-hypertension articles and genes as of April 24, 2012. We also retrieved genes for these ROS-hypertension articles from NCBI gene2pubmed (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/DATA) data. The newly found genes from gene2pubmed were added to the ROS-hypertension gene set. The positions of genes in the human genome were downloaded from the Ensembl Biomart database (NCBI build 36). Some gene symbols were different from the results of SciMiner and Biomart, such as NOS2A → NOS2 and STN → EEF1A2. The functional analysis tools, such as SciMiner, WebGestalt [9, 10], and DAVID [11, 12], were used for enrichment analysis to find the pathway with ROS-hypertension-associated genes, and the statistical significance of biological functions was calculated with Benjamini and Hochberg-adjusted p < 0.05 as the cutoff.