[BioC] RMA normalization,which samples should be normalized together

Dipl.-Ing. Johannes Rainer johannes.rainer at tugraz.at
Tue Feb 8 08:55:56 CET 2005


thank you naomi,

this is exactly what i've done til now, first i have normalized each 
patient seperatly (or some patients together if i had three chips of 
one patient (as RMA works not so good with a small uneven number of 
chips)), and then when we finished to do the chips from all patients i 
normalized them all togehter.

in the first analysis i searched for the genes that were regulated 
(bigger or smaller then M=1 (M=-1 respectively)) in most patients. the 
genes found by this method are fairly the same like those i got when 
normalizing all patients together and doing a wilcoxon test.

that's all fine, but my boss was surprised to see that our replicates 
(=quality controls) looked better in the "single patient normalization 
way" than after normalizing all patients toghether.

well, thanks for your answer, i think i will normalize all chips 
together and my boss has to accept that our controls are not as nice as 
they should be... thanks, jo
Quoting Naomi Altman <naomi at stat.psu.edu>:

> Dear Johannes,
> Actually, technical replication is of little interest when you have 
> biological replication.  If I understand your experiment, you have 40 
> patients, each measured at 2 times.
>
> Because of the pairing, you have several options for appropriate 
> normalization and analysis:
>
> 1) Normalize the before and after for each patient together, and analyze M.
>
> You could use either RMA, or a simpler M vs A loess for this.
>
> 2) Normalize all the arrays together and then compute M for each patient.
>
> I would use RMA or gcRMA for this.
>
> In either case, I would simply use limma with the contrast   
> rep(1,npatients) since this gives the t-test for before-after which 
> seems to be of most interest.  Limma has an advantage over ordinary 
> t-tests in that it combines some information across genes.  However, 
> I expect it to be very similar to ordinary t-tests (or Wilcoxon 
> tests) because you have a fairly large sample size.  Any of these 
> methods are appropriate.
>
> Incidentally, the technical reps are interesting for quality control, 
> but should not be included in this analysis.
>
> --Naomi
>
> At 09:48 AM 2/7/2005, Dipl.-Ing. Johannes Rainer wrote:
>> thanks arne
>>
>> i have no replicates, affymetrix is still a little bit expensive ;) 
>> . all our chips were made by ourself and by looking at the 
>> histograms of the raw values there are no differences at all. in the 
>> whole experiment we made also two replicates, one with the same RNA, 
>> but different amount before amplification (one time 5 mug, the 
>> second time 1 mug) and the second replicate is RNA from the same 
>> patient, same time point, but the RNA was extracted by two different 
>> people  not at the same time. if i normalize only those replicated 
>> chips i see nearly no differences between them (with a M (log2 
>> regulation value) cut off of M=1 i get about 30 probe sets that 
>> differ), but when i normalize all 80 chips of all patients together 
>> the replicated chips show more differences... in my opinion i have 
>> to normalize all patient chips together, exspecially if i want to do 
>> for example a wilcox between all 0 hour and 6 hours chips.
>> can you tell me a little bit more about the linear model you have 
>> used to merge the results?
>>
>> regards, jo
>>
>>
>> Quoting Arne.Muller at sanofi-aventis.com:
>>
>>> Dear Johannes,
>>>
>>> I've a study with 84 affy chip to characterize a dose effect of a 
>>> drug. The study was conducted in 3 different laboratories. There 
>>> are strong differences betweent the laboratories and I've RMA 
>>> normalized per laboratory and then merged the results in a single 
>>> linear moel including the laboratory as an additional factor. Maybe 
>>> you can make the patient or source of RNA a random factor in a mixe 
>>> effects model - if you've replication per patient.
>>>
>>> Just looking at those genes with a significant dose effect I did 
>>> not find much differences between normalizing all chips together and
>>> normalizing per laboratory.
>>>
>>>         regards,
>>>
>>>         Arne
>>>
>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: bioconductor-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
>>>> [mailto:bioconductor-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch]On Behalf Of Dipl.-Ing.
>>>> Johannes Rainer
>>>> Sent: 07 February 2005 10:13
>>>> To: bioconductor at stat.math.ethz.ch
>>>> Subject: [BioC] RMA normalization,which samples should be normalized
>>>> together
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> hi,
>>>> we are interested in the response of patients to a special treatment,
>>>> so we have patient samples before and after treatment. i have
>>>> normalized this samples in different ways using RMA. As RMA tries to
>>>> detect and correct probe effects by looking at the expresison
>>>> levels of
>>>> the probes across all chips it is not surprising that the outcome of
>>>> the analysis differs depending on which chips i normalize together.
>>>> It is clear that i have to normalize all patient samples
>>>> together if i
>>>> want to compare the expression values of the genes (lets say using
>>>> statistical tests). i am also analyzing the chips using the 'old
>>>> fashioned way' by using M and A values and i suppose it is not
>>>> problematic at all to compare M values of lets say patient 1, 6 hours
>>>> sample against 0 hours sample with those from patient 2, also 6 hours
>>>> versus 0 hours where the chips from the two patients were NOT
>>>> normalized together.
>>>>
>>>> -now my question is if someone else has experience in what samples
>>>> could and should be normalized together with RMA. I saw that ther are
>>>> (big) differences in the regulation (M) values if i normalize two
>>>> different patients together compared with the values that i
>>>> get when i
>>>> normalize only samples from the same patients together.
>>>>
>>>> thanks in advance
>>>>
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>
> Naomi S. Altman                                814-865-3791 (voice)
> Associate Professor
> Bioinformatics Consulting Center
> Dept. of Statistics                              814-863-7114 (fax)
> Penn State University                         814-865-1348 (Statistics)
> University Park, PA 16802-2111
>
>
>




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