Literature-aided meta-analysis of microarray data: a compendium study on muscle development and disease

Background: Comparative analysis of expression microarray studies is difficult due to the large influence of technical factors on experimental outcome. Still, the identified differentially expressed genes may hint at the same biological processes. However, manually curated assignment of genes to biological processes, such as pursued by the Gene Ontology (GO) consortium, is incomplete and limited. We hypothesised that automatic association of genes with biological processes through s-controlled mining of Medline abstracts would be more effective. Therefore, we developed a novel algorithm (LAMA: Literature-Aided Meta-Analysis) to quantify the similarity between transcriptomics studies. We evaluated our algorithm on a large compendium of 102 microarray studies published in the field of muscle development and disease, and compared it to similarity measures based on gene overlap and over-representation of biological processes assigned by GO. Results: While the overlap in both genes and ove...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Rob Jelier, Peter A. C. 't Hoen, Ellen Sterrenburg, Johan T. den Dunnen, Gert-Jan B. van Ommen, Jan A. Kors, Barend Mons
• Keywords: Biological Processes, BMCBI 2008, Microarray Studies, Technical Factors