RT Journal
A1 Simin, Karl
A1 Scuderi, Anne
A1 Reamey, James
A1 Dunn, Diane
A1 Weiss, Robert
A1 Metherall, James E.
A1 Letsou, Anthea
T1 Profiling Patterned Transcripts in Drosophila Embryos
JF Genome Research 
JO Genome Research 
YR 2002 
FD July 01 
VO 12 
IS 7 
SP 1040 
OP 1047 
DO 10.1101/gr.84402 
UL http://genome.cshlp.org/content/12/7/1040.abstract 
AB Here we describe a high-throughput screen to isolate transcripts with spatially restricted patterns of expression in early embryos. Our approach utilizes robotic automation for rapid analysis of sequence-selected cDNAs in a whole-mount in situ hybridization assay. We determined the spatial distribution of a random collection of 778 different genes from an embryonic cDNA library and show that a significant fraction of these exhibit patterned profiles of expression. In addition, gene ontology studies revealed groups of gene products exhibiting shared expression patterns, providing new insights into the largely overlooked effector molecules that function in development. As described in this paper, automated hybridization to whole-mount embryos in situ proved to be straightforward and provided us with a very powerful method for the global survey of gene expression in early embryos. From the perspective of biological significance, our finding that many spatially restricted transcripts correspond to loci encoding novel transcripts that have not been previously identified in nearly saturating genetic screens for maternal effect and zygotic lethals is particularly notable.[Supplementary material available online at http://www.genome.org. The following individuals kindly provided reagents, samples, or unpublished information as indicated in the paper: N. Brown]