[BioC] AffyRNAdeg slopes

[James W. MacDonald]

Vawter, Marquis wrote:
> Hi Jim, just a follow-up to your post, when you referred to outliers on the
> density plot in discussing AffyRNAdeg slopes, is this a function within the
> AffyRNAdeg program?  Best wishes, Mark

No, it's just an eyeballometric measurement on my part. However, it 
appears that you might be confusing what I said. My point was that the 
results from the density plot (different looking curves) are usually 
much more indicative of how things are going to work out than the 
AffyRNAdeg plots (non-parallel lines).

When I analyze Affy data, I always do the density and AffyRNAdeg plots 
as QC. If I have a chip or chips that look different (on the density 
plot), I will use the residual plots in the affyPLM package to see how 
well the medianpolish algorithm is fitting the data, and the 'outliers' 
usually have huge residuals.

Another thing I like to do to QC the data is to do a principal 
components analysis of the expression values (e.g., after fitting RMA or 
GCRMA or whatever) and plot the first two principal components. If I 
don't get reasonable grouping of my samples on this plot it usually 
indicates that the replicates are not very similar, which almost never 
bodes well for the downstream analyses.

Jim


> "Anyway, in my experience, large differences in slope are less critical than
> big differences between the density plots. I find that outliers on the
> density plot nearly always require a redo of the chip, whereas chips with
> very different slopes in the RNA degradation plot may be usable."
> 
> 
> Marquis P. Vawter, Ph.D.
> Director, Functional Genomics Laboratory
> Department of Psychiatry & HB
> Medical Science - D433, Zot Code 1675
> University of California, College of Medicine 
> Irvine CA 92697-1675
> 
> Email mvawter at uci.edu <mailto:mvawter at uci.edu>
> Phone 949-824-9014
> Fax 949-824-7012
> 
> Lab: Gillespie Neuroscience Bldg., Room 3226
> Zot code 4260B.
> Lab: 949-824-9170
> 
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-- 
James W. MacDonald
Affymetrix and cDNA Microarray Core
University of Michigan Cancer Center
1500 E. Medical Center Drive
7410 CCGC
Ann Arbor MI 48109