Transcriptional Profiling of Stress Response or Slow Growth?

Transcriptomic profiling analyses are frequently used for the study of cells in response to environmental stress factors that often impede cell optimal growth. Given that transcriptional profiles of optimally growing cells differ significantly from those of sub-optimally growing cells, stress-induceddifferentially-transcribed genes are thus inevitably mixed with slow growthgenes.

Stress Response

It is therefore necessary to separate the stress-specific response genes from slow growth genes. Methodologies used to deconvolute stress-specific response from non-specific response such as slow growth are discussed in this editorial. Transcription regulation is one of the major ways to control gene activity in cells. Hence, transcription levels of genes are thought to be linked largely to the levels of gene activity. Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) was the technology that for the first time allows the study of a transcriptome or a majority of transcripts in eukaryotic cells. Instead of sequencing the entire Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) derived from cDNA libraries, the SAGE method takes only a ~15 bps tag from end of each cDNA fragment and ligates to chain multiple short cDNA tags for PCR amplification and sequencing analysis. Read more>>>>>>>