Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ioannidis, John PA

Titel

Microarrays and molecular research: noise discovery?

Ist Teil von

• The Lancet (British edition), 2005-02, Vol.365 (9458), p.454-455

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Microarrays produce information of unparalleled wealth. This information is their great, fascinating advantage-and their downfall. Let us suppose for a moment that no gene is important for any disease outcome and that it is all random noise. That scenario is scary: this noise is so data-rich that minimum, subtle, and unconscious manipulation can generate spurious "significant" biological findings that withstand validations by the best scientists, in the best journals. Biomedical science would then be entrenched in some ultramodern middle ages, where tons of noise is accepted as "knowledge". However, hopefully, some biological variables must indeed be important-but how do we suppress surrounding noise? If 30 genes determine the outcome of a specific cancer, we expect upfront that each gene (of 30 000 tested) has a 1:1000 chance on average to be truly important. The same caveat applies not only in gene-related applications, but also in proteomics,6 and all discovery-oriented molecular research where enormous databases can be rapidly generated from just a handful of patients.7 With such massive information, usually there cannot be any strong a-priori hypothesis that specific biological factors are more important than others. Any confident claims of "biological plausibility" sit on very slippery ground.8