Rather than identify differentially expressed genes using a fold change cutoff, one can use a variety of statistical tests or omnibus tests such as ANOVA, all of which consider both fold change and variability to create a p-value, an estimate of how often we would observe the data by chance alone. Applying p-values to microarrays is complicated by the large number of multiple comparisons (genes) involved. For example, a p-value of 0.05 is typically thought to indicate significance, since it estimates a 5% probability of observing the data by chance. But with 10,000 genes on a microarray, 500 genes would be identified as significant at p < 0.05 even if there were no difference between the experimental groups. One obvious solution is to consider significant only those genes meeting a much more stringent p value criterion, e.g., one could perform a Bonferroni correction on the p-values, or use a false discovery rate calculation to adjust p-values in proportion to the number of parallel tests involved. Unfortunately, these approaches may reduce the number of significant genes to zero, even when genes are in fact differentially expressed. Current statistics such as Rank products aim to strike a balance between false discovery of genes due to chance variation and non-discovery of differentially expressed genes. Commonly cited methods include the Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM) and a wide variety of methods are available from Bioconductor and a variety of analysis packages from bioinformatics companies.