Strategy for minimizing between-study variation of large-scale phenotypic experiments using multivariate analysis

Anal Chem. 2012 Oct 16;84(20):8675-81. doi: 10.1021/ac301869p. Epub 2012 Oct 1.

Abstract

We have developed a multistep strategy that integrates data from several large-scale experiments that suffer from systematic between-experiment variation. This strategy removes such variation that would otherwise mask differences of interest. It was applied to the evaluation of wood chemical analysis of 736 hybrid aspen trees: wild-type controls and transgenic trees potentially involved in wood formation. The trees were grown in four different greenhouse experiments imposing significant variation between experiments. Pyrolysis coupled to gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS) was used as a high throughput-screening platform for fingerprinting of wood chemotype. Our proposed strategy includes quality control, outlier detection, gene specific classification, and consensus analysis. The orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) method was used to generate the consensus chemotype profiles for each transgenic line. These were thereafter compiled to generate a global dataset. Multivariate analysis and cluster analysis techniques revealed a drastic reduction in between-experiment variation that enabled a global analysis of all transgenic lines from the four independent experiments. Information from in-depth analysis of specific transgenic lines and independent peak identification validated our proposed strategy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Cluster Analysis
  • Discriminant Analysis
  • Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry
  • Models, Statistical
  • Multivariate Analysis
  • Phenotype
  • Plants, Genetically Modified / chemistry
  • Plants, Genetically Modified / genetics*
  • Populus / chemistry
  • Populus / genetics*
  • Principal Component Analysis
  • Trees / chemistry
  • Trees / genetics*
  • Wood / chemistry
  • Wood / genetics*