The MIT Press recently published Microarrays for the Neurosciences: An Essential Guide. The book, edited by Daniel Geschwind, director of the neurogenetics program at the UCLA School of Medicine, and Jeffrey Gregg, director of molecular pathology at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, is provides a comprehensive guide for neuroscientists on the use of DNA microarrays. It includes an overview of technology, as well as scanning and imaging, statistically based array analysis methods, and a discussion of gene expression studies in the central nervous system. The book provides a look at microarray technology that considers the complexity of human nervous system tissue and discusses the use of postmortem human tissue.
Marc Ramoni, of the Harvard Medical School informatics program at Children’s Hospital in Boston has introduced a new program for temporal analysis of gene expression data. The program, CAGED, or Cluster Analysis of Gene Expression Dynamics, uses Bayesian clustering by dynamics, a method that identifies the most probable set of clusters for a given time series. While designed for temporal data, the program can also handle a-temporal data. It requires a standard desktop computer that runs Windows 95/NT/98/ME/ 2000 and has at least 128 MB of RAM and a 300 MHz processor. It is available free of charge to academic and non-profit organizations; commercial licenses can be arranged by contacting the developers. For more information, go to http://genomethods.org/caged.