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.

Unbiased pattern detection in microarray data series.

Ahnert SE, Willbrand K, Brown FC, Fink TM

Theory of Condensed Matter, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK; Institut Curie, CNRS UMR 144, 75248 Paris Cedex 05, France.

MOTIVATION: Following the advent of microarray technology in recent years, the challenge for biologists is to identify genes of interest from the thousands of genetic expression levels measured in each microarray experiment. In many casereds the aim is to identify pattern in the data series generated by successive microarray measurements. RESULTS: Here we introduce a new method of detecting pattern in microarray data series which is independent of the nature of this pattern. Our approach provides a measure of the algorithmic compressibility of each data series. A series which is significantly compressible is much more likely to result from simple underlying mechanisms than series which are incompressible. Accordingly, the gene associated with a compressible series is more likely to be biologically significant. We test our method on microarray time series of yeast cell cycle and show that it blindly selects genes exhibiting the expected cyclic behaviour as well as detecting other forms of pattern. Our results successfully predict two independent non-microarray experimental studies.

Published 4 April 2006 in Bioinformatics.
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