unifiedWMWqPCR: the unified Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test for analyzing RT-qPCR data in R.

Abstract

Recently, De Neve et al. proposed a modification of the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) test for assessing differential expression based on RT-qPCR data. Their test, referred to as the unified WMW (uWMW) test, incorporates a robust and intuitive normalization and quantifies the probability that the expression from one treatment group exceeds the expression from another treatment group. However, no software package for this test was available yet. We have developed a Bioconductor package for analyzing RT-qPCR data with the uWMW test. The package also provides graphical tools for visualizing the effect sizes. The unifiedWMWqPCR package and its user documentation can be obtained through Bioconductor.