Computational approaches to analysis of DNA microarray data

Objectives: To review the current state of the art in computational methods for the analysis of DNA microarray data. Methods: The review considers methods of microarray data collection, transformation and representation, comparisons and predictions of gene expression from the data, their mechanistic analysis, related systems biology, and the application of clustering techniques. Results: Functional genomics approaches have greatly increased the rate at which data on biological systems is generated, leading to corresponding challenges in analyzing the data through advanced computational techniques. The paper compares and contrasts the application of computational clustering for discovery, comparison, and prediction of gene expression classes, together with their evaluation and relation to mechanistic ana lyses of biological systems. Conclusion: Methods for assaying gene expression levels by DNA microarray experiments produce considerably more data than other techniques, and require a wide variety of computational techniques for identifying patterns of expression that may he biologically significant. These will have to he verified and validated by comparison to results from other methods, integrated with other systems data, and provide the feedback for further experimentation for testing mechanistic or other biological hypotheses.