R + Bioconductor : combining probesets in an ExpressionSet
- by Mike Dewar
Hi,
First off, this may be the wrong Forum for this question, as it's pretty darn R+Bioconductor specific. Here's what I have:
library('GEOquery')
GDS = getGEO('GDS785')
cd4T = GDS2eSet(GDS)
cd4T <- cd4T[!fData(cd4T)$symbol == "",]
Now cd4T is an ExpressionSet object which wraps a big matrix with 19794 rows (probesets) and 15 columns (samples). The final line gets rid of all probesets that do not have corresponding gene symbols. Now the trouble is that most genes in this set are assigned to more than one probeset. You can see this by doing
gene_symbols = factor(fData(cd4T)$Gene.symbol)
length(gene_symbols)-length(levels(gene_symbols))
[1] 6897
So only 6897 of my 19794 probesets have unique probeset - gene mappings. I'd like to somehow combine the expression levels of each probeset associated with each gene. I don't care much about the actual probe id for each probe. I'd like very much to end up with an ExpressionSet containing the merged information as all of my downstream analysis is designed to work with this class.
I think I can write some code that will do this by hand, and make a new expression set from scratch. However, I'm assuming this can't be a new problem and that code exists to do it, using a statistically sound method to combine the gene expression levels. I'm guessing there's a proper name for this also but my googles aren't showing up much of use. Can anyone help?
