ABSTRACT
Progress in genome sequencing and annotation combined with technological advances permitting accurate, high-throughput analyses of mRNA abundance enables investigators to elucidate increasingly comprehensive views of transcriptional changes within tissue specimens from varied sources. High-throughput devices using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and robotic processing technology can perform hundreds of quantitatively robust assays in parallel, while custom or commercially available microarrays can simultaneously examine the expression of tens of thousands of transcripts from a single biological specimen. This unprecedented degree of analytical power provides exciting opportunities to provide novel insights into cell biology and an enormous variety of pathophysiological processes. At the same time, growth in analytical capacity creates a host of new challenges for virtually every facet of the scientific inquiry particularly study design, choice of appropriate control experiments, data management, analysis and interpretation. Indeed, increasing application of high-throughput technologies such as microrarrays has challenged the age old paradigm of hypothesisdriven research and data collection, by providing the technological platforms for parallel queries of massive data sets, thereby providing the alternative construct of data-driven research and hypothesis generation.
