An Application of Sequential Meta-Analysis to Gene Expression Studies

Most of the discoveries from gene expression data are driven by a study claiming an optimal subset of genes that play a key role in a specific disease. Meta-analysis of the available datasets can help in getting concordant results so that a real-life application may be more successful. Sequential meta-analysis (SMA) is an approach for combining studies in chronological order while preserving the type I error and pre-specifying the statistical power to detect a given effect size. We focus on the application of SMA to find gene expression signatures across experiments in acute myeloid leukemia. SMA of seven raw datasets is used to evaluate whether the accumulated samples show enough evidence or more experiments should be initiated. We found 313 differentially expressed genes, based on the cumulative information of the experiments. SMA offers an alternative to existing methods in generating a gene list by evaluating the adequacy of the cumulative information.