Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Fernandes, Andrew D
• Macklaim, Jean M
• Linn, Thomas G
• Reid, Gregor
• Gloor, Gregory B
• Parkinson, John

Titel

ANOVA-like differential expression (ALDEx) analysis for mixed population RNA-Seq

Ist Teil von

• PloS one, 2013-07, Vol.8 (7), p.e67019-e67019

Ort / Verlag

United States: Public Library of Science

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Experimental variance is a major challenge when dealing with high-throughput sequencing data. This variance has several sources: sampling replication, technical replication, variability within biological conditions, and variability between biological conditions. The high per-sample cost of RNA-Seq often precludes the large number of experiments needed to partition observed variance into these categories as per standard ANOVA models. We show that the partitioning of within-condition to between-condition variation cannot reasonably be ignored, whether in single-organism RNA-Seq or in Meta-RNA-Seq experiments, and further find that commonly-used RNA-Seq analysis tools, as described in the literature, do not enforce the constraint that the sum of relative expression levels must be one, and thus report expression levels that are systematically distorted. These two factors lead to misleading inferences if not properly accommodated. As it is usually only the biological between-condition and within-condition differences that are of interest, we developed ALDEx, an ANOVA-like differential expression procedure, to identify genes with greater between- to within-condition differences. We show that the presence of differential expression and the magnitude of these comparative differences can be reasonably estimated with even very small sample sizes.