Microarray Data Normalization and Robust Detection of Rhythmic Features

Abstract

Data derived from microarray technologies are generally subject to various sources of noise and accordingly the raw data are pre-processed before formally analysed. Data normalization is a key pre-processing step when dealing with microarray experiments, such as circadian gene-expressions, since it removes systematic variations across arrays. A wide variety of normalization methods are available in the literature. However, from our experience in the study of rhythmic expression patterns in oscillatory systems (e.g. cell-cycle, circadian clock), the choice of the normalization method may substantially impair the identification of rhythmic genes. Hence, the identification of a gene as rhythmic could be just as an artefact of how the data were normalized. Yet, gene rhythmicity detection is crucial in modern toxicological and pharmacological studies, thus a procedure to truly identify rhythmic genes that are robust to the choice of a normalization method is required.

To perform the task of detecting rhythmic features, we propose a rhythmicity measure based on bootstrap methodology to robustly identify rhythmic genes in oscillatory systems. Although our methodology can be extended to any high-throughput experiment, in this chapter, we illustrate how to apply it to a publicly available circadian clock microarray gene-expression data and give full details (both statistical and computational) so that the methodology can be used in an easy way. We will show that the choice of normalization method has very little effect on the proposed methodology since the results derived from the bootstrap-based rhythmicity measure are highly rank correlated for any pair of normalization methods considered. This suggests, on the one hand, that the rhythmicity measure proposed is robust to the choice of the normalization method, and on the other hand, that gene rhythmicity detected using this measure is potentially not a mere artefact of the normalization method used. In this way the researcher using this methodology will be protected against the possible effect of different normalizations, as the conclusions obtained will not depend so strongly on them. Additionally, the described bootstrap methodology can also be employed as a tool to simulate gene-expression participating in an oscillatory system from a reference data set.