Inconsistencies over time in 5% of NetAffx probe-to-gene annotations.
BACKGROUND
DNA microarray probes are designed to match particular mRNA transcripts, often based on expressed sequences like ESTs, or cDNAs, many times incomplete. As a result, the relations between probes and genes can change as the sequence data are updated. However, it is frequent that the reported results of microarray analyses are given just as lists of genes without any reference to the underlying probes.


RESULTS
We show for a particular commercial microarray design that the number of probes associated to some genes change with time. These changes concern approximately 5% of the probe sets across the history of annotation releases over a two year span.


CONCLUSIONS
We recommend to report probe set identifiers when publishing microarray results, and to submit those analyses to microarray public databases to ensure that the interpretation of the data is updated with the latest set of annotations.
Perez-Iratxeta
Carolina
C
Andrade
Miguel A
MA
D000818:Animals; D004867:Equipment Design; D051379:Mice; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D009626:Terminology as Topic