The Overlooked Fact: Fundamental Need for Spike-In Control for Virtually All Genome-Wide Analyses. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Genome-wide analyses of changes in gene expression, transcription factor occupancy on DNA, histone modification patterns on chromatin, genomic copy number variation, and nucleosome positioning have become popular in many modern laboratories, yielding a wealth of information during health and disease states. However, most of these studies have overlooked an inherent normalization problem that must be corrected with spike-in controls. Here we describe the reason why spike-in controls are so important and explain how to appropriately design and use spike-in controls for normalization. We also suggest ways to retrospectively renormalize data sets that were wrongly interpreted due to omission of spike-in controls.

publication date

  • December 28, 2015

Research

keywords

  • Genome-Wide Association Study

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC4760223

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 84961216002

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1038/nbt.2931

PubMed ID

  • 26711261

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 36

issue

  • 5