Study On Mechanism Of Cold-and Hot-ZHENG Based On Statistical Analysis Of Microarray Data

The modernization and globalization of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is an inevitable developing trend of TCM, one important task of which is to explain TCM theory in light of modern science."ZHENG"is a key concept in TCM theory and finding out its biological principle is important and meaningful. During these years, high-throughout biotechnologies including microarray provided a large amount of biological data so that we can start research on the biological mechanism of ZHENG in the view of biomolecular level and systems biology.We try to explore the method for explaining the mechanism of Cold- and Hot- ZHENG based on statistical analysis of microarray data. The main idea of the method is as follows: Firstly, based on available biological knowledge, we collect some Cold- and Hot- ZHENG related microarray datasets as well as a collection of gene sets priorly defined by biological knowledge; Secondly, using statistical significance analysis, we find out significant gene sets with respect to each microarray dataset; Finally, we choose the gene sets significant for a certain number of microarray datasets as the candidates which have potential association with Cold- and Hot- ZHENG.In order to integrate results from individual microarray analysis to give a reliable conclusion, we propose a series of gene-set-based statistical methods. We discuss these methods in details and provide corresponding implementing procedures, including statistical description of differential expressed genes in several experimental cases, significance testing methods for gene sets and multiple hypothesis testing correction methods. We apply these methods to virtual microarray datasets and gene sets, and find some candidate gene sets which have potential association with Cold- and Hot- ZHENG. These candidate gene sets can provide meaningful clues and hypotheses for further experimental verification.