Dataset Information

Beyond Affymetrix arrays: expanding the set of known hybridization isotherms and observing pre-wash signal intensities.

ABSTRACT: Microarray hybridization studies have attributed the nonlinearity of hybridization isotherms to probe saturation and post-hybridization washing. Both processes are thought to distort 'true' target abundance because immobilized probes are saturated with excess target and stringent washing removes loosely bound targets. Yet the paucity of studies aimed at understanding hybridization and dissociation makes it difficult to align physicochemical theory to microarray results. To fill the void, we first examined hybridization isotherms generated on different microarray platforms using a ribosomal RNA target and then investigated hybridization signals at equilibrium and after stringent wash. Hybridization signal at equilibrium was achieved by treating the microarray with isopropanol, which prevents nucleic acids from dissolving into solution. Our results suggest that (i) the shape of hybridization isotherms varied by microarray platform with some being hyperbolic or linear, and others following a power-law; (ii) at equilibrium, fluorescent signal of different probes hybridized to the same target were not similar even with excess of target and (iii) the amount of target removed by stringent washing depended upon the hybridization time, the probe sequence and the presence/absence of nonspecific targets. Possible physicochemical interpretations of the results and future studies are discussed.

SUBMITTER: Pozhitkov AE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2836560 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Beyond Affymetrix arrays: expanding the set of known hybridization isotherms and observing pre-wash signal intensities.

Pozhitkov Alex E AE Boube Idrissa I Brouwer Marius H MH Noble Peter A PA

Nucleic acids research 20091206 5

Microarray hybridization studies have attributed the nonlinearity of hybridization isotherms to probe saturation and post-hybridization washing. Both processes are thought to distort 'true' target abundance because immobilized probes are saturated with excess target and stringent washing removes loosely bound targets. Yet the paucity of studies aimed at understanding hybridization and dissociation makes it difficult to align physicochemical theory to microarray results. To fill the void, we firs ...[more]

PMID: 19969547

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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.

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.

Dataset Information

Beyond Affymetrix arrays: expanding the set of known hybridization isotherms and observing pre-wash signal intensities.

Publications

Beyond Affymetrix arrays: expanding the set of known hybridization isotherms and observing pre-wash signal intensities.

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