A gene expression screen.

A gene expression screen identifies mRNAs that differ in abundance between two mRNA mixtures by a subtractive hybridization method. The two mRNA populations are converted to double-stranded cDNAs, fragmented, and ligated to linkers for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. The multiple cDNA fragments isolated from any given gene can be treated as alleles in a genetic screen. Probability analysis of the frequency with which multiple alleles are found provides an estimation of the total number of up- and down-regulated genes. We have applied this method to genes that are differentially expressed in amphibian tadpole tail tissue in the first 24 hr after thyroid hormone treatment, which ultimately induces tail resorption. We estimate that there are about 30 up-regulated genes; 16 have been isolated.