A new pooling strategy for high-throughput screening: the Shifted Transversal Design

Background: In binary high-throughput screening projects where the goal is the identification of low-frequency events, beyond the obvious issue of efficiency, false positives and false negatives are a major concern. Pooling constitutes a natural solution: it reduces the number of tests, while providing critical duplication of the individual experiments, thereby correcting for experimental noise. The main difficulty consists in designing the pools in a manner that is both efficient and robust: few pools should be necessary to correct the errors and identify the positives, yet the experiment should not be too vulnerable to biological shakiness. For example, some information should still be obtained even if there are slightly more positives or errors than expected. This is known as the group testing problem, or pooling problem. Results: In this paper, we present a new non-adaptive combinatorial pooling design: the "shifted transversal design" (STD). It relies on arithmetics, an...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Nicolas Thierry-Mieg
• Keywords: BMCBI 2006, Combinatorial Pooling Designs, Non-adaptive Combinatorial Pooling, Transversal Design