Variable locus length in the human genome leads to ascertainment bias in functional inference for non-coding elements.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Several functional gene annotation databases have been developed in the recent years, and are widely used to infer the biological function of gene sets, by scrutinizing the attributes that appear over- and underrepresented. However, this strategy is not directly applicable to the study of non-coding DNA, as the non-coding sequence span varies greatly among different gene loci in the human genome and longer loci have a higher likelihood of being selected purely by chance. Therefore, conclusions involving the function of non-coding elements that are drawn based on the annotation of neighboring genes are often biased. We assessed the systematic bias in several particular Gene Ontology (GO) categories using the standard hypergeometric test, by randomly sampling non-coding el

SUBMITTER: Taher L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2647827 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature