DIFFERENTIAL DISPLAY APPROACH TO QUANTITATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL STIMULI ON BACTERIAL GENE-EXPRESSION

The differential display of the mRNA technique for eukaryotes is fruit ful in identifying genes with altered transcription rates caused by ex ogenous or endogenous stimuli. Prokaryotic analogues of the method usi ng arbitrary oligonucleotides may reach a complete statistical genome coverage. Thus a genome-wide mass screening for transcriptionally regu lated sequences will be possible. However, the primer sets have to be optimized for a given species to result in maximum band yields. Hence the construction of primers requires the calculation of oligonucleotid e frequency distributions from known coding regions to choose sequence s with frequent occurrence in the bacterial genome. After completion o f many whole genome sequencing projects, differentially regulated cDNA sequences are readily identified by sequence comparisons.