Plant & Animal Genome VI Conference Plant & Animal Genome VI Conference
S5
Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Plant Biology, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
With the advent of large scale cDNA and genome sequencing projects, gene sequence information is accumulating at an accelerating rate. New technologies will be required to exploit this vast resource fully. One such technology is the DNA microarray technique (Schena et al. 1995). In brief, DNA microarrays consist of hundreds to thousands of cDNAs arrayed on a glass slide. In a reverse northern procedure, fluorescently-labeled mRNA is hybridized to the microarray and then scanned with a modified scanning laser microscope providing a quantiative measure of mRNA levels for all genes represented in the microarray. Like many technical advances, the DNA microarrays make possible experiments that were previously impossible. Specifically, global analysis of the expression of most or all genes of an organism can be performed giving a more holistic view of responses to environmental or developmental cues (DeRisi et al. 1997). In agriculture, this technology will expand our understanding of how plants integrate responses to various stresses (e.g., nutrient limitation, pathogen attack). Also, it will bring a greater understanding of fundamental processes that have been difficult to study due to their inherent complexity (e.g., the allocation of resources between vegetative growth and seed production, flowering timing). In this talk, I will present an overview of the DNA microarray technique and outline our initial experiments to survey gene expression patterns in plants responding to powdery mildew infections.
REFERENCES