Several authors have studied expression in gene sets with specific goals: overrepresentation of interesting genes in functional groups, predictive power for class membership and searches for groups where the constituent genes show coordinated changes in expression under the experimental conditions. The purpose of this article is to follow the third direction. One important aspect is that the gene sets under analysis are known a priori and are not determined from the experimental data at hand. Our goal is to provide a methodology that helps to identify the relevant structural constituents (phenotypical, experimental design, biological component) that determine gene expression in a group.