Tirosh Itay, Bilu Yonatan, Barkai Naama
Department of Molecular Genetics, Weizmann Institute of Science, 76100 Rehovot, Israel.
Curr Opin Biotechnol. 2007 Aug;18(4):371-7. doi: 10.1016/j.copbio.2007.07.003. Epub 2007 Aug 10.
Comparative analysis is a fundamental tool in biology. Conservation among species greatly assists the detection and characterization of functional elements, whereas inter-species differences are probably the best indicators of biological adaptation. Traditionally, comparative approaches were applied to the analysis of genomic sequences. With the growing availability of functional genomic data, comparative paradigms are now being extended also to the study of other functional attributes, most notably the gene expression. Here we review recent works applying comparative analysis to large-scale gene expression datasets and discuss the central principles and challenges of such approaches.
比较分析是生物学中的一种基本工具。物种间的保守性极大地有助于功能元件的检测和表征，而物种间的差异可能是生物适应性的最佳指标。传统上，比较方法应用于基因组序列分析。随着功能基因组数据的日益丰富，比较范式现在也扩展到其他功能属性的研究，最显著的是基因表达。在这里，我们回顾了最近将比较分析应用于大规模基因表达数据集的研究工作，并讨论了这些方法的核心原则和挑战。
