Molecular Medicine, Ottawa Health Research Institute, 501 Smyth Road, Ottawa, Ontario, K1H 8L6, Canada. pkrzyzanowski@ohri.ca
We describe a method for detecting marker genes in large heterogeneous collections of gene expression data. Markers are identified and characterized by the existence of demarcations in their expression values across the whole dataset, which suggest the presence of groupings of samples. We apply this method to DNA microarray data generated from 83 mouse stem cell related samples and describe 426 selected markers associated with differentiation to establish principles of stem cell evolution.