
Chapter 23
Functional analys is and biological
interpret ation of microarray da t a
There are no facts, only interpretations.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
23.1 Over-representation analysis (ORA)
The availability of GO and many cross-refer e nc ing databases seems to solve
the problem of interpreting the results of a microarray experiment fro m a bio-
logical point of view. Most database s provide efficient search mechanisms that
return quickly all annota tion information associated to any specific gene or
gene product of interest. However, the problem is that most relevant databases
are oriented towards a manual, gene by g e ne querying. If the proce ssing ...