Probabilistic Methods for Bioinformatics

CHAPTER 12Analyzing Gene Expression Data

Recall from Section 4.2.2 that the protein transcription factor produced by one gene can have a causal effect on the level of mRNA (called the gene expression level) of another gene. In recent years, microarray technology has enabled researchers to measure the expression level of all genes in an organism, thereby providing us with the data to investigate the causal relationships among the genes. Early tools for analyzing microarray data used clustering algorithms (see, e.g., [Spellman et al, 1998]). These algorithms determine groups of genes that have similar expression levels in a given experiment. Thus ...