Table 1.

Summary of the advantages and disadvantages of transcriptomic techniques GP2S and TCAP

	GP2S (Stegle at al. 2010)	TCAP (Kiddle et al. 2010)
Advantages	Effectively acts as a filter to remove genes/metabolites which do not change in expression /concentration over time Computationally fast Developed to be robust to outliers  Uses data from all biological replicates (not mean) to produce models  Synchronized observation times are not required  Can be extended to elucidate the time at which differential expression/metabolite concentration differences begin to occur	Information–rich similarity measure and clustering algorithm finds gene expression / metabolite concentrations which follow the same time series or incorporates temporal changes: a) Delays—a similar time series profile but with a lag b) Transient correlations—similar time series for some time points, not all c) Inversions—same time series profile but inverted d) Combination of the above Robust, with little user input Output simple to interpret
Disadvantages	Only compares two treatment groups at a time	Mean time series of replicates required Whilst faster than other transcriptomics clustering algorithms, it is computationally intensive