Technologies of high-throughput tissue-specific gene expression profiling

Abstract

Gene expression profiling is an important strategy to study animal development, response to stimuli and diseases. RNAs measured in gene expression profiling experiments are frequently purified from mixture of multiple cell types. The resultant data have low resolution, incapable of distinguishing transcriptome of different cell types and likely biased towards up-regulated genes in dominant tissues. These problems can be solved by obtaining tissue-specific gene expression profile. For dozens of years, there have been several strategies developed to isolate specific tissues or purify RNAs from tissue of interest, and combined with high-throughput RNA assays to generate transcriptome of various specific tissues or cell types. This review will introduce basic principles of these methods and their application in large-scale transcriptome analysis, and discuss on their advantages and limitation.