PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Nadezda Kryuchkova-Mostacci AU - Marc Robinson-Rechavi TI - A benchmark of gene expression tissue-specificity metrics AID - 10.1101/027755 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 027755 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/09/28/027755.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/09/28/027755.full AB - One of the major properties of genes is their expression pattern. Notably, genes are often classified as tissue-specific or housekeeping. While many different methods of measuring tissue specificity have been proposed and used, there has been no comparison or benchmarking of these methods to our knowledge, and little justification of their use. In this study we compare nine measures of tissue-specificity. Most methods were established for ESTs and microarrays, and several were later adapted to RNA-seq. We analyze their capacity to distinguish gene categories, their robustness to the choice and number of tissues used, and their capture of evolutionary conservation signal.