
114 Statistics and Data Analysis for Microarrays Using R and Bioconductor
obtain a meaningful value that is proportional to the level of express ion of the
gene.
A second important difference is that in oligo arrays, there is no back-
ground. The entire surface of the chip is covered by probes and a background
value cannot be used a s an indication of the level of intensity in the lack of
hybridization. However, as described in Chapter 3, the Affymetrix arrays rep-
resent a gene using a set of match/mismatch probes. In genera l, these arrays
contain 20 different probes for each gene or EST. Each probe consists of 25
nucleotides (thus called a 25-mer).