Finding disease specific alterations in the co-expression of gene

Dennis Kostka, MPIMG, CMB, compdiag

Standard analysis routines for microarray data aim at differentially expressed genes. We address the complementary problem of detecting sets of differentially co--expressed genes in two phenotypically distinct sets of expression profiles. We introduce a score for differential co--expression, and suggest a computationally efficient algorithm for finding high scoring sets of genes. The use of our novel method is demonstrated in the context of simulations and on real expression data from a clinical study.