Method comparison for analyzing wound healing rates.

Wound healing scratch assay is a frequently used method to characterize cell migration, which is an important biological process in the course of development, tissue repair, and immune response for example. The measurement of wound healing rate, however, varies among different studies. Here we summarized these measurements into three types: (I) direct rate average; (II) regression rate average; and (III) average distance regression rate. Using Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells as a model, we compared the three types of analyses on quantifying the wound closing rate, and discovered that type I & III measurements are more resistant to outliers, and type II analysis is more sensitive to outliers. We hope this study can help researchers to better use this simple yet effective assay.

Detection bias in microarray and sequencing transcriptomic analysis identified by housekeeping genes.

This work includes the original data used to discover the gene ontology bias in transcriptomic analysis conducted by microarray and high throughput sequencing (Zhang et al., 2015) [1]. In the analysis, housekeeping genes were used to examine the differential detection ability by microarray and sequencing because these genes are probably the most reliably detected. The genes included here were compiled from 15 human housekeeping gene studies. The provided tables here comprise of detailed chromosomal location, detection breadth, normalized expression level, exon count, total exon length, and total intron length of each concerned gene and their related transcripts. We hope this information can help researchers better understand the differences in gene ontology-bias we discussed (Zhang et al., 2015) [1] and can encourage further improvement on these two technology platforms.

Membrane gene ontology bias in sequencing and microarray obtained by housekeeping-gene analysis.

Microarray (MA) and high-throughput sequencing are two commonly used detection systems for global gene expression profiling. Although these two systems are frequently used in parallel, the differences in their final results have not been examined thoroughly. Transcriptomic analysis of housekeeping (HK) genes provides a unique opportunity to reliably examine the technical difference between these two systems. We investigated here the structure, genome location, expression quantity, microarray probe coverage, as well as biological functions of differentially identified human HK genes by 9 MA and 6 sequencing studies. These in-depth analyses allowed us to discover, for the first time, a subset of transcripts encoding membrane, cell surface and nuclear proteins that were prone to differential identification by the two platforms. We hope that the discovery can aid the future development of these technologies for comprehensive transcriptomic studies.