Group testing for pathway analysis improves comparability of different microarray datasets

摘要

Motivation: The wide use of DNA microarrays for the investigation of the cell transcriptome triggered the invention of numerous methods for the processing of microarray data and lead to a growing number of microarray studies that examine the same biological conditions. However, comparisons made on the level of gene lists obtained by different statistical methods or from different datasets hardly converge. We aimed at examining such discrepancies on the level of apparently affected biologically related groups of genes, e.g. metabolic or signalling pathways. This can be achieved by group testing procedures, e.g. over-representation analysis, functional class scoring (FCS), or global tests.