Description
The recently released Affymetrix Human Gene 1.0 ST array has two major differences compared with standard 3' based arrays: (1) it interrogates the entire mRNA transcript, and (2) it uses cDNA targets. To assess the impact of these differences on array performance, we performed series of comparative hybridizations between the Human Gene 1.0 ST and the Affymetrix HG-U133 Plus 2.0 and the Illumina HumanRef-8 BeadChip arrays. Additionally, both cRNA and cDNA targets were probed on the HG-U133 Plus 2.0 array. The results show that the overall reproducibility is best using the Gene 1.0 ST array. When looking only at the high intensity probes, the reproducibility of the Gene 1.0 ST array and the Illumina BeadChip array is equally good. Concordance of array results was assessed using different inter-platform mappings. The Gene 1.0 ST is most concordant with the HG-U133 array hybridized with cDNA targets, thus showing the impact of the target type. Agreements are better between platforms with designs which choose probes from the 3' end of the gene. Overall, the high degree of correspondence provides strong evidence for the reliability of the Gene 1.0 ST array.