Experimental Comparison and Evaluation of the Affymetrix Exon and U133Plus2 GeneChip Arrays

Background. Affymetrix exon arrays offer scientists the only solution for exon-level expression profiling at the whole-genome scale on a single array. These arrays feature a new chip design with no mismatch probes and a radically new random primed protocol to generate sense DNA targets along the entire length of the transcript. In addition to these changes, a limited number of validating experiments and virtually no experimental data to rigorously address the comparability of all-exon arrays with conventional 3'-arrays result in a natural reluctance to replace conventional expression arrays with the new all-exon platform. Methodology. Using commercially available Affymetrix arrays, we assess the performance of the Human Exon 1.0 ST (HuEx) and U133 Plus 2.0 (U133Plus2) platforms directly through a series of 'spike-in' hybridizations containing 25 transcripts in the presence of a fixed eukaryotic background. Specifically, we compare the measures of expression for HuEx and U133Plus2 arrays to evaluate the precision of these measures as well as the specificity and sensitivity of the measures' ability to detect differential expression. Significance. This study presents an experimental comparison and systematic cross-validation of Affymetrix exon arrays and establishes high comparability of expression changes and probe performance characteristics between Affymetrix conventional and exon arrays. In addition, this study offers a reliable benchmark data set for the comparison of competing exon expression measures, the selection of methods suitable for mapping exon array measures to the wealth of previously generated microarray data, as well as the development of more advanced methods for exon- and transcript-level expression summarization.