The answer is a strong
Yes. A very large number of transcripts have correlations above 0.7
(absolute value) with App mRNA. The precise number today is 208. But this
will change as we add more strains and arrays. In any case, this is a fairly
large number and all of these correlations are significant at alpha .05 even
when correcting for the enormous numbers of tests (12422 tests). |
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What does this imply? |
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That there can be
massive codependence of expression variance among transcripts. App is NOT an
isolated instance. This is improtant biologically and statistically. From a
statistical perspective, we would like to know how many ÒindependentÓ test
we effectively are performing when we use array data in this way. Are we
testing 12000 independent transcripts or just 1200 transcriptional ÒmodulesÓ
each with blurred boarders but each with about 10 effective members. There
is no answer yet, but we probaby have a large enough data set to begin to
answer this question. |