Optimal High-Throughput Screening: Practical Experimental Design and Data Analysis for Genome-Scale RNAi Research

This concise, self-contained, and cohesive book focuses on commonly used and recently developed methods for designing and analyzing high-throughput screening (HTS) experiments from a statistically sound basis. Combining ideas from biology, computing, and statistics, the author explains experimental designs and analytic methods that are amenable to rigorous analysis and interpretation of RNAi HTS experiments. The opening chapters are carefully presented to be accessible both to biologists with training only in basic statistics and to computational scientists and statisticians with basic biological knowledge. Biologists will see how new experiment designs and rudimentary data-handling strategies for RNAi HTS experiments can improve their results, whereas analysts will learn how to apply recently developed statistical methods to interpret HTS experiments.

Dr Xiaohua Douglas Zhang is an associate director at Merck Research Laboratories. He has worked on data analysis for genome-wide RNAi research and microarrays in drug discovery and development for various diseases for many years. He has continuously developed novel analytic methods and experimental designs for quality control and hit selection in genome-scale RNAi research. He and his colleagues have published many papers in various peer-reviewed journals, including Cell Host and Microbe, Nucleic Acids Research, Bioinformatics, Genetic Epidemiology, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Pharmacogenomics, Genomics and the Journal of Biomolecular Screening, among many others.