Jean Yang

The Bioconductor project is an initiative for the collaborative creation of extensible software for computational biology and bioinformatics. The goals of the project include: fostering collaborative development and widespread use of innovative software, reducing barriers to entry into interdisciplinary scientific research, and promoting the achievement of remote reproducibility of research results. We describe details of our aims and methods, identify current challenges, compare Bioconductor to other open bioinformatics projects, and provide working examples.

There are many sources of systematic variation in cDNA microarray experiments which affect the measured gene expression levels (e.g. differences in labeling efficiency between the two fluorescent dyes). The term normalization refers to the process of removing such variation. A constant adjustment is often used to force the distribution of the intensity log ratios to have a median of zero for each slide. However, such global normalization approaches are not adequate in situations where dye biases can depend on spot overall intensity and/or spatial location within the array. This article proposes normalization methods that are based on robust local regression and account for intensity and spatial dependence in dye biases for different types of cDNA microarray experiments. The selection of appropriate controls for normalization is discussed and a novel set of controls (microarray sample pool, MSP) is introduced to aid in intensity-dependent normalization. Lastly, to allow for comparisons of expression levels across slides, a robust method based on maximum likelihood estimation is proposed to adjust for scale differences among slides.

DNA microarrays are a new and promising biotechnology whichallows the monitoring of expression levels in cells for thousands of genes simultaneously. The present paper describes statistical methods for the identification of differentially expressed genes in replicated cDNA microarray experiments. Although it is not the main focus of the paper, new methods for the important pre-processing steps of image analysis and normalization are proposed. Given suitably normalized data, the biological question of differential expression is restated as a problem in multiple hypothesis testing: the simultaneous test for each gene of the null hypothesis of no association between the expression levels and responses or covariates of interest. Di erentially expressed genes are identified based on adjusted p-values for a multiple testing procedure which strongly controls the family-wise Type I error rate and takes into account the dependence structure between the gene expression levels. No specific parametric form is assumed for the distribution of the test statistics and a permutation procedure is used to estimate adjusted p-values. Several data displays are suggested for the visual identification of differentially expressed genes and of important features of these genes. The above methods are applied to microarray data from a study of gene expression in the livers of mice with very low HDL cholesterol levels. The genes identified using data from multiple slides are compared to those identified by recently published single-slide methods.

The Bioconductor project is an initiative for the collaborative creation of the extensible software for computational biology and bioinformatics. The goals of the project include: fostering collaborative development and widespread use of innovative software, reducing barriers to entry into interdisciplinary scientific research, and promoting the achievement of remote reproducibility of research results. We describe details of our aims and methodes, identify current challenges, compare Bioconductor to other open bioinformatics projects, and provide working examples.