identical aliquots of an mrna sample u1a and u1b were analyzed with two microarrays from the same manufacturing lot a linear scatter plot for gene expression confirmed that the data was generally reproducible fig1 a but failed to resolve the vast majority of genes that are expressed at low levels to better resolve these genes we chose to display the data in a cube root scatter plot this permitted the inclusion of negative levels of expression that are sometimes generated by the genechip u00ae software the cube root scatter plot fig1 b revealed three salient features the large percentage of genes 24 assigned negative levels of expression the large percentage of genes with low levels of expression and the low signal to noise ratio at low levels of expression 0056 fig1 a is a linear scatter plot of gene expression in a sample hybridized to two microarrays using a conventional technique where each gene i in the microarray is represented by a point with coordinates consisting of gene expression measured in uninduced cell line 1 from hybridization a x u1a i and gene expression in the same cell line from hybridization b x u1b i as can be observed from fig1 a only a small number of highly expressed genes are resolved visually with most of the genes compressed into a small region of the plot so that they would be difficult to resolve visually one method of distributing such data points more uniformly is a logarithmic scatter plot but the log function cannot accept the negative values for gene expression generated by the microarrays fig1 b is a cube root scatter plot of gene expression from the data in fig1 a to illustrate an aspect of the invention as will be clear from a comparison of fig1 a.