Identifying drosophila cell-cycle regulated genes from irregular microarray data

Due to experimental constraints, most microarray observations are obtained through irregular sampling. In this paper three popular spectral analyzing schemes, i.e., Lomb-Scargle, Capon and the missing data amplitude and phase estimation (MAPES), are compared in terms of their ability and efficiency to recover the periodically expressed genes. The in silico experiments based on microarray measurements of drosophila melanogaster not only verify half of the published cell-cycle genes, but also corroborate genes that behave periodically in human Hela time series experiments.