Identifying Significant Temporal Variation in Time Course Microarray Data Without Replicates. Rattus norvegicus

An important component of time course microarray studies is the identification of genes that demonstrate significant time-dependent variation in their expression levels. Until recently available methods for performing such significance tests required replicates of individual time points. This paper describes a replicate-free method that was developed as part of a study of the estrous cycle in the rat mammary gland in which no replicate data was collected. Keywords: developmental time course (time series) throughout the estrus cycle in rat mammary gland singlet data Overall design: Key points are examined in a time series over the four day estrus cycle of rat mammary gland in virgin (null parous). Singlet rats at each time point were used for mathematical analysis in this study for a total of 31 individual arrays.