Adjusted Confidence Intervals for the Expression Change of Proteins observed in 2-Dimensional Difference Gel Electrophoresis

Differential proteome analyses focus on the detection and quantification of expression changes between samples from different biological groups. While the significance of an expression change is detected by some statistical test, the strength of an expression change is usually quantified by some ratio estimate, e.g. the ‘fold change’. Due to its quantitative character, the fold change is more intuitively for biologists than the decision of a statistical test. However, strong expression changes are often misleading if this change is not significant. For this reason, we propose the employment of confidence intervals, adjusted for multiple hypotheses testing, which naturally comprise both, test decision and quantification. The adjusted confidence intervals can be used for making test decisions under the control of error rates typically considered in multiple hypotheses testing (e.g. the familywise error rate or the false discovery rate). For biologists, test decisions based on adjusted confidence intervals offer a more intuitive method for selecting proteins with a significant expression change between two groups. The length of the intervals can be used for sample size planning of upcoming experiments. Our approach is primarily addressed to protein expression data recorded by two-dimensional Difference Gel Electrophoresis.