Prediction of transcriptional activity based on gene association with the nuclear matrix.

In this report, we show that androgen-dependent genes expressed in rat ventral prostate, C1, C2 and C3, are enriched in residual DNA extracted from the nuclear matrix of ventral prostate. The enrichment is androgen-dependent and is likely to be related to their transcriptional activity. While this finding corroborates other data demonstrating that transcriptionally active genes can be protected from nuclease digestion by their association with the nuclear matrix, we have extended this analysis to show that nuclear matrix protection experiments can be used both to analyze tissue-specific expression among members of a highly related gene family and also to predict transcriptional activity of genes in particular tissues.