Monitoring of Gene Regulations Using Average Rank in DNA Microarray: Implementation of R

Traditional procedures for DNA microarray data analysis are to preprocess and normalize the gene expression data, and then to analyze the normalized data using statistical tests. Drawbacks of the traditional methods are: genuine biological signal may be unwillingly eliminated together with artifacts, the limited number of arrays per gene make statistical tests difficult to use the normality assumption or nonparametric method, and genes are tested independently without consideration of interrelationships among genes. A novel method using average rank in each array is proposed to eliminate such drawbacks. This average rank method monitors differentially regulated genes among genetically different groups and the selected genes are somewhat different from those selected by traditional P-value method. Addition of genes selected by the average rank method to the traditional method will provide better understanding of genetic differences of groups.