Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Statistical Implications Of Pooling Rna Samples For Microarray Experiments, Xuejun Peng, Constance L. Wood, Eric M. Blalock, Kuey Chu Chen, Philip W. Landfield, Arnold J. Stromberg

Statistics Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Microarray technology has become a very important tool for studying gene expression profiles under various conditions. Biologists often pool RNA samples extracted from different subjects onto a single microarray chip to help defray the cost of microarray experiments as well as to correct for the technical difficulty in getting sufficient RNA from a single subject. However, the statistical, technical and financial implications of pooling have not been explicitly investigated.

RESULTS: Modeling the resulting gene expression from sample pooling as a mixture of individual responses, we derived expressions for the experimental error and provided both upper and lower bounds for …