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Taking a census of mRNA populations with microbeads

Nature Biotechnology volume 18, pages 597–598 (2000)Cite this article

It has long been known that cells respond to changes in their environment by modulating the expression of a large number of genes simultaneously, and that different cell types differ from each other in the expression of a large number of genes. Thus, there is a need to define cellular responses and cell types by profiling mRNA populations, something that until fairly recently was done only on a gene-by-gene basis. However, two major categories of techniques have emerged in the past few years for analyzing expression of large sets of genes in parallel. The first uses two-dimensional arrays of hybridization probes, in which each element of the array is complementary to a different mRNA1. The second category is based on representational cloning and sequencing of cDNAs from libraries; the more abundant an mRNA is in a tissue, the more frequently it will appear in a library of clones2,3. Although these survey techniques provide a faithful representation of the abundance of common transcripts in mRNA populations, the sequencing effort that is necessary to detect rare mRNAs and to monitor their expression levels is overwhelming.

In this issue, Brenner et al.4 describe a third method for global analysis of gene expression, which combines the attractive features of both of these approaches. They “clone” mRNAs on the surface of microbeads, and then sequence a small stretch of each clone using a novel sequencing procedure. With this procedure, hundreds of thousands of clones can be interrogated in parallel, in order to ascertain a characteristic “signature” for each mRNA. The abundance of an mRNA is then determined by counting the number of clones found in the library that possess the same signature.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Determination of the sequence of a region of cDNA attached to a microbead.

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  1. associate at the Department of Molecular Genetics, Public Health Research Institute, 455 First Avenue, New York, 10016, NY

    Sanjay Tyagi

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  1. Sanjay Tyagi
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Tyagi, S. Taking a census of mRNA populations with microbeads. Nat Biotechnol 18, 597–598 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/76426

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