title: Dramatically reduced precision in microarray analysis retains quantitative properties and provides additional benefits.
abstract: Microarray technology is a primary tool for elucidating the differences between similar populations of nucleic acid molecules. It is frequently used to detect mRNA population shifts that result from perturbations such as environmental changes, host-pathogen interactions, or the shift from therapeutic to toxic drug doses. Unfortunately, current microarray analysis methods provide only undirected discovery tools and cannot be directed to a particular hypothesis. To address this issue, we demonstrate that biologically relevant aspects of expression profiles may be captured by precision-reduced descriptions that are fully human readable, and that biologically relevant relationships may be captured by applying familiar pattern searching techniques to these precision-reduced descriptions. Even expression profiles that are reduced to only a single bit of precision, retain the surprising ability to reproduce the clustering results from the full 16-bit precision original data. We also illustrate that simple verbal descriptions ("my gene's expression went up briefly at timepoint 10") of expression profiles are quantitative entities fully compatible with clustering and searching within the precision reduced data.
authors: The Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine, The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, OH 43205, USA. ray.29@osu.edu
authors: William C
authors: WC
authors: Ray
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D017489:CDC28 Protein Kinase, S cerevisiae / Q000235:genetics; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D019295:Computational Biology; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005800:Genes, Fungal; D006801:Humans; D005810:Multigene Family; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D017489:CDC28 Protein Kinase, S cerevisiae