For that reason, traditional tools available for the analysis of expression microarrays are focused on a general approach, providing summarized values of all the probes in a probe set [e.g. RMA (Bolstad et al., 2003), MAS5 and PLIER].
The Steroltalk v2 cDNA microarray was focused on targeted functional groups such as enzymes from cholesterol biosynthesis (18/21 probes; coverage 85.7%), nuclear receptor families (45/49 probes; coverage 93.75%; http://www.nursa.org/) and members of the cytochrome P450 (38/103 probes, coverage 36.9%) [ 14].
Therefore the BoMP microarray is focussed towards investigating the response of myeloid cells, but is of sufficient size and diversity to allow for successful normalization of microarray data.
Since the Wnt pathway is known to be involved in neural stem cell-differentiation in contra-acting ways (i.e., maintain stemness versus inducing differentiation [19] [21], the investigation of the microarray data was focused on Wnt pathway-related gene sets.
Microarray data was focused on the Affymetrix platform in order to reduce variance arising from platform inconsistencies.
Although the microarray design was focused on clinical diagnostics, its application to further fields like quality control of food or water as well as veterinary medicine is imaginable.
This probably due to the fact that only a very limited number of differentially displayed proteins were identified by proteomics, most of which showed differential display only at the later stages of culture (5 and 8 weeks of culture) but not at the early stage (at two weeks) at which this microarray analysis was focused on.
Microarray data analyses were focused, amongst others, on genes of the ergosterol biosynthesis pathway.
With the use of microarray analysis, extensive studies have been focused on identifying morphine-induced changes in gene expression [ 6– 19].
Both analyses were carried out in the three comparisons made with microarrays and the resulting heat maps were focused on hormones involved in grape berry ripening with a primary role (i.e. auxin, ethylene, abscisic acid and brassinosteroids).
