Whole-body gene expression by data mining

To date, a comprehensive survey of the expression of lysyl oxidase (LOX), l ysyl oxidase-like 1 (LOXL1), and lysyl oxidase-like 2 (LOXL2) has yet to be performed. The use of in vitro strategies to accomplish this task would pr ove daunting as it is both time-consuming and costly. We present a new in s ilico data mining strategy that directly addresses these limitations. Seque nces corresponding to the 3' untranslated regions of LOX LOXL1, and LOXL2 w ere individually queried against the human expressed sequence tag database (dbEST), In this manner, the entire tissue repertoire available in the dbES T was surveyed. This provided an estimate of the levels of mRNA transcripts in a variety of adult and fetal tissues. We have also employed this strate gy to determine the pattern of expression and levels of a newly discovered gene, CGI-15. The veracity of this technique has been independently assesse d by semiquantitative PCR analysis. The application of this technology is b ounded only by the ever-growing information available in the GenBank, UniGe ne, and human EST databases. The utility of our data mining strategy to est ablish relative transcript levels in numerous tissues is presented, (C) 200 1 Academic Press.