Performance evaluation of commercial miRNA expression array platforms

BACKGROUND: microRNAs (miRNA) are short, endogenous transcripts that negatively regulate the expression of specific mRNA targets. The relative abundance of miRNAs is linked to function in vivo and miRNA expression patterns are potentially useful signatures for the development of diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic biomarkers. FINDING: We compared the performance characteristics of four commercial miRNA array technologies and found that all platforms performed well in separate measures of performance. CONCLUSIONS: The Ambion and Agilent platforms were more accurate, whereas the Illumina and Exiqon platforms were more specific. Furthermore, the data analysis approach had a large impact on the performance, predominantly by improving precision.