Just to elaborate slightly on Sean's response, the idea of the empirical Bayes "pooling" strategy used in limma is that you don't need to choose between using a fold change strategy or using t-tests. Rather the software moves you on sliding scale between these two strategies depending on how much information there is about the variances in the data and how different the variances seem to be. In your situation, with only 1 df for error, the limma rankings will usually be much closer to fold-change ranking than to a t-test ranking. Even here the moderated t-statistic approach is usually still preferable over ranking on fold change because genes for which the available replicates disagree will get down-weighted.
Gordon
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