Experimental design for three-color and four-color gene expression microarrays

Bioinformatics. 2005 Jun:21 Suppl 1:i459-67. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bti1031.

Abstract

Motivation: Three-color microarrays, compared with two-color microarrays, can increase design efficiency and power to detect differential expression without additional samples and arrays. Furthermore, three-color microarray technology is currently available at a reasonable cost. Despite the potential advantages, clear guidelines for designing and analyzing three-color experiments do not exist.

Results: We propose a three- and a four-color cyclic design (loop) and a complementary graphical representation to help design experiments that are balanced, efficient and robust to hybridization failures. In theory, three-color loop designs are more efficient than two-color loop designs. Experiments using both two- and three-color platforms were performed in parallel and their outputs were analyzed using linear mixed model analysis in R/MAANOVA. These results demonstrate that three-color experiments using the same number of samples (and fewer arrays) will perform as efficiently as two-color experiments. The improved efficiency of the design is somewhat offset by a reduced dynamic range and increased variability in the three-color experimental system. This result suggests that, with minor technological improvements, three-color microarrays using loop designs could detect differential expression more efficiently than two-color loop designs.

Availability: http://www.jax.org/staff/churchill/labsite/software

Supplementary information: Multicolor cyclic design construction methods and examples along with additional results of the experiment are provided at http://www.jax.org/staff/churchill/labsite/pubs/yong.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Color
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Data Interpretation, Statistical
  • Expressed Sequence Tags
  • Mice
  • Mice, Inbred C57BL
  • Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / methods*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Software