Assessing affymetrix GeneChip microarray quality
2011

Assessing Microarray Quality

Sample size: 22328 publication 10 minutes Evidence: moderate

Author Information

Author(s): Matthew N. McCall, Peter N. Murakami, Margus Lukk, Wolfgang Huber, Rafael A. Irizarry

Primary Institution: University of Rochester Medical Center

Hypothesis

How can we effectively assess the quality of Affymetrix GeneChip microarrays?

Conclusion

Approximately 10 percent of publicly available Affymetrix microarrays are of poor quality, and quality varies significantly across studies and labs.

Supporting Evidence

  • The study found that single-array quality metrics are essential for clinical applications.
  • The new GNUSE metric was shown to perform as well as existing multi-array metrics.
  • Quality varied significantly across different studies and labs, indicating a need for better standards.

Takeaway

This study looked at how to check if microarray data is good or bad, and found that about 10 out of every 100 samples are not good enough to use.

Methodology

The study defined microarray quality, reviewed existing metrics, and proposed a new single-array quality metric called GNUSE, assessing over 22,000 arrays from the Gene Expression Omnibus.

Potential Biases

Some labs are more likely to produce poor quality arrays than others, which could bias results.

Limitations

The study primarily focused on Affymetrix microarrays and may not generalize to other platforms.

Participant Demographics

The study assessed data from 809 studies across various labs and tissue types.

Statistical Information

P-Value

<0.05

Statistical Significance

p<0.05

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1186/1471-2105-12-137

Want to read the original?

Access the complete publication on the publisher's website

View Original Publication