The healthy ageing gene expression signature for Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis: a random sampling perspective

In a recent publication, Sood et al. (Genome Biol 16:185, 2015) presented a set of 150 probe sets that could be used in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) based on gene expression. We reproduce some of their experiments and show that their signature is indeed able to discriminate between AD and control patients using blood gene expression in two cohorts. We also show that its performance does not stand out compared to randomly sampled sets of 150 probe sets from the same array. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13059-018-1481-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.