An Efficient Functional Analysis Method for Micro-array Data Using Gene Ontology

Microarray data includes tens of thousands of gene expressions simultaneously, so it can be effectively used in identifying the phenotypes of diseases. However, the retrieval of functional information from a large corpus of gene expression data is still a time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for identifying functional categories of differentially expressed genes from a micro-array experiment by using Gene Ontology (GO). Our method is as follows: (1) The expression data set is first filtered to include only genes with mean expression values that differ by at least 3-fold between the two groups. (2) The genes are then ranked based on the t-statistics. The 100 most highly ranked genes are selected as informative genes. (3) The t-value of each informative gene is imposed as a score on the associated GO terms. High-scoring GO terms are then listed with their associated genes and represent the functional category information of the micro-array experiment. A system called HMDA (Hallym Micro-array Data analysis) is implemented on publicly available micro-array data sets and validated. Our results were also compared with the original analysis.