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I am studying gene expression profiling considering a dataset available on NCBI website. I do not understand the following: why are there some genes that have different profile and different ID numbers but they refer to the same indentical gene ?

The dataset that I am analysing is here .

For instance, we have that ID-8938, ID-1870, ID-7323 and ID-15 refer to the same gene called RadA but the gene expression profiling is different for each ID. So I ask which is the difference between these ID if they represent the same gene ? Moreover, how can I understand which is the one that has to be chosen for the analysis ?

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  • $\begingroup$ Why would you expect only a single profile measurement to be in the database for a gene? $\endgroup$ – mgkrebbs Sep 22 '20 at 20:46
  • $\begingroup$ @mgkrebbs because if you do the measurement of the mRNA produced in those time points for that gene, how can I obtain other measurements for the same time points ? Do they take other cellular cultures of the same organism and make the same measurements at the same time points to check if the values are consistent ? $\endgroup$ – Manuela Sep 23 '20 at 7:17
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What you are looking at there is a microarray dataset (see the description here).

Microarrays are chips that have many sequence specific probes on them and sometimes they have multiple probes for the same gene. Readout differences between the probes of the same gene could be caused by either noise in the data or biological effects like expression differences between transcript isoforms - other reasons could be possible as well.

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