Focused Microarray Analysis: Characterization of Phenomes by Gene Expression Profiling

Although microarray analysis is a highly promising technology in the genome era, its application for gene expression profiling to characterize various phenomes, including genetic phenotypes, diseases, responses to chemicals and clinical annotations, is far from being a real use. One of the obstacles is the quality of the data, which needs to be enough to be able to solely use microarrays for these purposes. For this, selecting a set of genes as a molecular signature, based on transcriptomics, proteomics or metabolomics, and the use of the selected set of genes in focused microarrays has great merits. Here, we summarize how sets of genes were selected, what types of genes were used and what kind of statistics will be needed for focused microarrays, to distinguish them from genome-wide microarrays and to explain why focused microarray analysis is advantageous in gene expression profiling.