Dataset Information

Cross-hybridization modeling on Affymetrix exon arrays.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Microarray designs have become increasingly probe-rich, enabling targeting of specific features, such as individual exons or single nucleotide polymorphisms. These arrays have the potential to achieve quantitative high-throughput estimates of transcript abundances, but currently these estimates are affected by biases due to cross-hybridization, in which probes hybridize to off-target transcripts.

Results

To study cross-hybridization, we map Affymetrix exon array probes to a set of annotated mRNA transcripts, allowing a small number of mismatches or insertion/deletions between the two sequences. Based on a systematic study of the degree to which probes with a given match type to a transcript are affected by cross-hybridization, we developed a strategy to correct for cross-hybridization biases of gene-level expression estimates. Comparison with Solexa ultra high-throughput sequencing data demonstrates that correction for cross-hybridization leads to a significant improvement of gene expression estimates.

Availability

We provide mappings between human and mouse exon array probes and off-target transcripts and provide software extending the GeneBASE program for generating gene-level expression estimates including the cross-hybridization correction http://biogibbs.stanford.edu/~kkapur/GeneBase/.

SUBMITTER: Kapur K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2639301 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Cross-hybridization modeling on Affymetrix exon arrays.

Kapur Karen K Jiang Hui H Xing Yi Y Wong Wing Hung WH

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) 20081104 24

<h4>Motivation</h4>Microarray designs have become increasingly probe-rich, enabling targeting of specific features, such as individual exons or single nucleotide polymorphisms. These arrays have the potential to achieve quantitative high-throughput estimates of transcript abundances, but currently these estimates are affected by biases due to cross-hybridization, in which probes hybridize to off-target transcripts.<h4>Results</h4>To study cross-hybridization, we map Affymetrix exon array probes ...[more]

PMID: 18984598

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Project description:BACKGROUND: Alternative splicing and isoform level expression profiling is an emerging field of interest within genomics. Splicing sensitive microarrays, with probes targeted to individual exons or exon-junctions, are becoming increasingly popular as a tool capable of both expression profiling and finer scale isoform detection. Despite their intuitive appeal, relatively little is known about the performance of such tools, particularly in comparison with more traditional 3' targeted microarrays. Here, we use the well studied Microarray Quality Control (MAQC) dataset to benchmark the Affymetrix Exon Array, and compare it to two other popular platforms: Illumina, and Affymetrix U133. RESULTS: We show that at the gene expression level, the Exon Array performs comparably with the two 3' targeted platforms. However, the interplatform correlation of the results is slightly lower than between the two 3' arrays. We show that some of the discrepancies stem from the RNA amplification protocols, e.g. the Exon Array is able to detect expression of non-polyadenylated transcripts. More importantly, we show that many other differences result from the ability of the Exon Array to monitor more detailed isoform-level changes; several examples illustrate that changes detected by the 3' platforms are actually isoform variations, and that the nature of these variations can be resolved using Exon Array data. Finally, we show how the Exon Array can be used to detect alternative isoform differences, such as alternative splicing, transcript termination, and alternative promoter usage. We discuss the possible pitfalls and false positives resulting from isoform-level analysis. CONCLUSION: The Exon Array is a valuable tool that can be used to profile gene expression while providing important additional information regarding the types of gene isoforms that are expressed and variable. However, analysis of alternative splicing requires much more hands on effort and visualization of results in order to correctly interpret the data, and generally results in considerably higher false positive rates than expression analysis. One of the main sources of error in the MAQC dataset is variation in amplification efficiency across transcripts, most likely caused by joint effects of elevated GC content in the 5' ends of genes and reduced likelihood of random-primed first strand synthesis in the 3' ends of genes. These effects are currently not adequately corrected using existing statistical methods. We outline approaches to reduce such errors by filtering out potentially problematic data.

Project description:BackgroundDNA microarrays are used both for research and for diagnostics. In research, Affymetrix arrays are commonly used for genome wide association studies, resequencing, and for gene expression analysis. These arrays provide large amounts of data. This data is analyzed using statistical methods that quite often discard a large portion of the information. Most of the information that is lost comes from probes that systematically fail across chips and from batch effects. The aim of this study was to develop a comprehensive model for hybridization that predicts probe intensities for Affymetrix arrays and that could provide a basis for improved microarray analysis and probe development. The first part of the model calculates probe binding affinities to all the possible targets in the hybridization solution using the Langmuir isotherm. In the second part of the model we integrate details that are specific to each experiment and contribute to the differences between hybridization in solution and on the microarray. These details include fragmentation, wash stringency, temperature, salt concentration, and scanner settings. Furthermore, the model fits probe synthesis efficiency and target concentration parameters directly to the data. All the parameters used in the model have a well-established physical origin.ResultsFor the 302 chips that were analyzed the mean correlation between expected and observed probe intensities was 0.701 with a range of 0.88 to 0.55. All available chips were included in the analysis regardless of the data quality. Our results show that batch effects arise from differences in probe synthesis, scanner settings, wash strength, and target fragmentation. We also show that probe synthesis efficiencies for different nucleotides are not uniform.ConclusionsTo date this is the most complete model for binding on microarrays. This is the first model that includes both probe synthesis efficiency and hybridization kinetics/cross-hybridization. These two factors are sequence dependent and have a large impact on probe intensity. The results presented here provide novel insight into the effect of probe synthesis errors on Affymetrix microarrays; furthermore, the algorithms developed in this work provide useful tools for the analysis of cross-hybridization, probe synthesis efficiency, fragmentation, wash stringency, temperature, and salt concentration on microarray intensities.

Project description:BackgroundAffymetrix GeneChips are an important tool in many facets of biological research. Recently, notable design changes to the chips have been made. In this study, we use publicly available data from Affymetrix to gauge the performance of three human gene expression arrays: Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 (U133), Human Exon 1.0 ST (HuEx) and Human Gene 1.0 ST (HuGene).ResultsWe studied probe-, exon- and gene-level reproducibility of technical and biological replicates from each of the 3 platforms. The U133 array has larger feature sizes so it is no surprise that probe-level variances are smaller, however the larger number of probes per gene on the HuGene array seems to produce gene-level summaries that have similar variances. The gene-level summaries of the HuEx array are less reproducible than the other two, despite having the largest average number of probes per gene. Greater than 80% of the content on the HuEx arrays is expressed at or near background. Biological variation seems to have a smaller effect on U133 data. Comparing the overlap of differentially expressed genes, we see a high overall concordance among all 3 platforms, with HuEx and HuGene having greater overlap, as expected given their design. We performed an analysis of detection rates and area under ROC curves using an experiment made up of several mixtures of 2 human tissues. Though it appears that the HuEx array has worse performance in terms of detection rates, all arrays have similar ability to separate differentially expressed and non-differentially expressed genes.ConclusionDespite noticeable differences in the probe-level reproducibility, gene-level reproducibility and differential expression detection are quite similar across the three platforms. The HuEx array, an all-encompassing array, has the flexibility of measuring all known or predicted exonic content. However, the HuEx array induces poorer reproducibility for genes with fewer exons. The HuGene measures just the well-annotated genome content and appears to perform well. The U133 array, though not able to measure across the full length of a transcript, appears to perform as well as the newer designs on the set of genes common to all 3 platforms.

Dataset Information

Cross-hybridization modeling on Affymetrix exon arrays.

Motivation

Results

Availability

Publications

Cross-hybridization modeling on Affymetrix exon arrays.

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