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Updated: May 7, 2026

Determining Genome-wide Transcript Decay Rates in Proliferating and Quiescent Human Fibroblasts
Published on: January 2, 2018
Curbing false discovery rates in interpretation of genome-wide expression profiles
Bernard Ycart1, Frédéric Pont2, Jean-Jacques Fournié2
1Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France; Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, CNRS UMR 5224, Grenoble, France; Laboratoire d'Excellence 'TOUCAN', Toulouse, France.
Abstract:
Fisher's exact test is widely used in biomedical research, particularly in genomic profile analysis. Since in most databases, the frequency distribution of genes is right skewed, we show here that its use can lead to excessive false-positive discoveries. We propose to apply Zelen's exact test on a stratification of the gene set; this solves the false discovery problem, and should avoid misleading interpretations of lists of genes produced by various genome-wide analysis technologies.

