Microarrays Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Microarrays, including details on experiments, designs, statistics, analysis, software.

SIMAGE: SImulation of DNA-MicroArray Gene Expression data.

Albers CJ, Jansen RC, Kok J, Kuipers OP, Van Hijum SA

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Simulation of DNA-microarray data serves at least three purposes: (i) optimizing the design of an intended DNA microarray experiment, (ii) comparing existing pre-processing and processing methods for best analysis of a given DNA microarray experiment, (iii) educating students, lab-workers and other researchers by making them aware of the many factors influencing DNA microarray experiments. RESULTS: Our model has multiple layers of factors influencing the experiment. The relative influence of such factors can differ significantly between labs, experiments within labs, etc. Therefore, we have added a module to roughly estimate their parameters from a given data set. This guarantees that our simulated data mimics real data as closely as possible. CONCLUSIONS: We introduce a model for the simulation of dual-dye cDNA-microarray data closely resembling real data and coin the model and its software implementation SIMAGE which stands for simulation of microarray gene expression data. The software is freely accessible at: http://bioinformatics.biol.rug.nl/websoftware/simage.

Published 14 April 2006 in BMC Bioinformatics, 7(1): 205.
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