Bioinformatics 18(4), 576-584
ISSN / ISBN: 1367-4803
Motivation: Typical analysis of microarray data has focused on spot by spot comparisons within a single organism. Less analysis has been done on the comparison of the entire distribution of spot intensities between experiments and between organisms. Results: Here we show that mRNA transcription data from a wide range of organisms and measured with a range of experimental platforms show close agreement with Benford’s law and Zipf’s law. The distribution of the bulk of microarray spot intensities is well approximated by a log-normal with the tail of the distribution being closer to power law. The variance, σ2, of log spot intensity shows a positive correlation with genome size (in terms of number of genes) and is therefore relatively fixed within some range for a given organism. The measured value of σ2 can be significantly smaller than the expected value if the mRNA is extracted from a sample of mixed cell types. Our research demonstrates that useful biological findings may result from analyzing microarray data at the level of entire intensity distributions
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Reference Type: Journal Article
Subject Area(s): Biology, Medical Sciences, Statistics