Analysis of strain and regional variation in gene expression in mouse brain

Using conservative statistical criteria, we identified at least 63 genes showing strain variation and approximately 600 genes showing regional variation. Unlike ad hoc methods, ours have the additional benefit of ranking the genes by statistical score, permitting further analysis to focus on the most significant. Comparison of our results to the previous studies and to published reports on individual genes show that we achieved high sensitivity while preserving selectivity.

CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that molecular differences between the strains and regions studied are larger than indicated previously. We conclude that for large complex datasets, ANOVA and feature selection, alone or in combination, are more powerful than methods based on fold-change thresholds and other ad hoc selection criteria.