Quality assessment of affymetrix GeneChip data

Affymetrix GeneChips are one of the best established microarray platforms. This powerful technique allows users to measure the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. However, a microarray experiment is a sophisticated and time consuming endeavor with many potential sources of unwanted variation that could compromise the results if left uncontrolled. Increasing data volume and data complexity have triggered growing concern and awareness of the importance of assessing the quality of generated microarray data. In this review, we give an overview of current methods and software tools for quality assessment of Affymetrix GeneChip data. We focus on quality metrics, diagnostic plots, probe-level methods, pseudo-images, and classification methods to identify corrupted chips. We also describe RNA quality assessment methods which play an important role in challenging RNA sources like formalin embedded biopsies, laser-micro dissected samples, or single cells. No wet-lab methods are discussed in this paper.