Assessment of the relationship between signal intensities and transcript concentration for Affymetrix GeneChip arrays.

Background: Affymetrix microarrays have become increasingly popular in gene-expression studies; however, limitations of the technology have not been well established for commercially available arrays. The hybridization signal has been shown to be proportional to actual transcript concentration for specialized arrays containing hundreds of distinct probe pairs per gene. Additionally, the technology has been described as capable of distinguishing concentration levels within a factor of 2, and of detecting transcript frequencies as low as 1 in 2,000,000.