Abstract

Introduction Novel DNA microarray technologies enable the monitoring of expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. This allows for the first time a global view on the transcription levels of many (or all) genes when the cell undergoes specific conditions or processes. The potential of such technologies for functional genomics is tremendous: Measuring gene expression levels in different developmental stages, different body tissues, different clinical conditions and different organisms is instrumental in understanding genes function, gene networks, biological processes and effects of medical treatments. A first key step in the analysis of gene expression data is the identification of groups of genes that manifest similar expression patterns over several conditions. The corresponding algorithmic problem is to cluster multi-conditional gene expression patterns. A clustering problem consists of n elements and a characteristic ve

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