A methodology for global validation of microarray experiments

Background  

DNA microarrays are popular tools for measuring gene expression of biological samples. This ever increasing popularity is ensuring that a large number of microarray studies are conducted, many of which with data publicly available for mining by other investigators. Under most circumstances, validation of differential expression of genes is performed on a gene to gene basis. Thus, it is not possible to generalize validation results to the remaining majority of non-validated genes or to evaluate the overall quality of these studies.