Differential display approach to quantitation of environmental stimuli on bacterial gene expression.

The differential display of the mRNA technique for eukaryotes is fruitful in identifying genes with altered transcription rates caused by exogenous or endogenous stimuli. Prokaryotic analogues of the method using arbitrary oligonucleotides may reach a complete statistical genome coverage. Thus a genome-wide mass screening for transcriptionally regulated sequences will be possible. However, the primer sets have to be optimized for a given species to result in maximum band yields. Hence the construction of primers requires the calculation of oligonucleotide frequency distributions from known coding regions to choose sequences with frequent occurrence in the bacterial genome. After completion of many whole genome sequencing projects, differentially regulated cDNA sequences are readily identified by sequence comparisons.