
Chapter 19
Quality control
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “Where have I gone wrong?”
Then a voice says to me, “This is going to take more than one night.”
—Charles M. Schulz
19.1 Introduction
An assessment of the quality of the data obtained in a given exper iment or from
a specific array is absolutely crucial for the further analysis and the corr e ct
interpretation of microarray data. Even a single or few abnormal arrays can
completely compromise the results of the analysis of a large data set. Hence ,
no analysis sho uld be performed before first making sure that the data are of
acceptable quality.
In most cases, problems with the quality