Bioinformatics strategies for cDNA-microarray data processing

 Pre-processing plays a vital role in cDNA-microarray data analysis. Without proper pre-processing it is likely that the biological conclusions will be misleading. However, there are many alternatives and in order to choose a proper pre-processing procedure it is necessary to understand the effect of different methods. This chapter discusses several pre-processing steps, including image analysis, background correction, normalization, and filtering. Spike-in data are used to illustrate how different procedures affect the analytical ability to detect differentially expressed genes and estimate their regulation. The result shows that pre-processing has a major impact on both the experiment’s sensitivity andits bias. However, general recommendations are hard to give, since pre-processing consists of several actions that are highly dependent on each other. Furthermore, it is likely that pre-processing have a major impact on downstream analysis, such as clustering and classification, and pre-processing methods should be developed and evaluated with this in mind.