Differential display: analysis of gene expression during plant cell separation processes

An essential component in the study of cell growth and development in any organism is the analysis of differential gene expression. There are numerous techniques available for comparison of two or more systems at the molecular level, including subtractive hybridization, reverse transcriptase (RT), polymerase chain reaction (PCR), differential screening of cDNA libraries, and, more recently, cDNA microarrays. Differential display has advantages in that it is relatively less time-consuming and can result in the identification of rare cDNA, which may be missed by conventional cDNA library screening. In addition, cDNA microarrays are a valuable asset to the analysis of regulated gene expression but the technique is expensive to employ. Although we successfully applied differential display to isolate novel mRNAs that are up- and downregulated during cell separation processes in plants, the technique can be applied to any system where two or more mRNA sets are to be compared.