Abstract
Gene expression profiles of clinical cohorts can be used to identify genes that are correlated with a clinical variable of interest such as patient outcome or response to a particular drug. However, expression measurements are susceptible to technical bias caused by variation in extraneous factors such as RNA quality and array hybridization conditions. If such technical bias is correlated with the clinical variable of interest, the likelihood of identifying false positive genes is increased. Here we describe a method to visualize an expression matrix as a projection of all genes onto a plane defined by a clinical variable and a technical nuisance variable. The resulting plot indicates the extent to which each gene is correlated with the clinical variable or the technical variable. We demonstrate this method by applying it to three clinical trial microarray data sets, one of which identified genes that may have been driven by a confounding technical variable. This approach can be used as a quality control step to identify data sets that are likely to yield false positive results.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | P L o S One |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Pages (from-to) | e61872 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| ISSN | 1932-6203 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |
Bibliographical note
© 2013 Krzystanek et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health through grants P50 CA089393, and R21LM008823-01A1, and by Danish Council for Independent Research-Medical Sciences (FSS). ZS is supported by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.