Insights into global mechanisms and disease by gene expression profiling

Methods Mol Biol. 2011:719:269-98. doi: 10.1007/978-1-61779-027-0_13.

Abstract

Transcriptomics has played an essential role as proof of concept in the development of experimental and bioinformatics approaches for the generation and analysis of Omics data. We are giving an introduction on how large-scale technologies for gene expression profiling, especially microarrays, have changed the view from studying single molecular events to a systems level view of global mechanisms in a cell, the biological processes, and their pathological mutations. The main platforms available for gene expression profiling (from microarrays to RNA-seq) are presented and the general concepts that need to be taken into account for proper data analysis in order to extract objective and general conclusions from transcriptomics experiments are introduced. We also describe the available main bioinformatics resources used for this purpose.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Databases, Genetic
  • Disease / genetics*
  • Gene Expression Profiling*
  • Humans
  • Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis
  • Oligonucleotide Probes / genetics
  • Quality Control
  • RNA / genetics
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA
  • Software
  • Statistics as Topic

Substances

  • Oligonucleotide Probes
  • RNA