[Rinsho Byori 50 : 52-60, 2002]

Gene Expression Profiling using Improved SAGE

Mikio YAMAMOTO, MD *

Serial analysis of gene expression(SAGE) is an experimental technique designed to gain a direct and quantitative measure of gene expression. The SAGE method is based on the isolation of unique sequence tags(9〜10bp in length) from individual mRNAs and serial concatenation of tags into long DNA molecules for lump-sum sequencing. The SAGE method can be applied to the studies exploring virtually any kinds of biological phenomena in which changes in cellular transcription are responsible. SAGE is a highly competent technology that can not only give a global gene expression profile of a particular type of cell or tissue, but also facilitate identification a set of specific genes related to the cellular conditions by comparing the profiles constructed for a pair of cells maintained under different conditions.
However, the original SAGE method contains several serious intrinsic problems, such as procedural difficulty in library construction, extremely short cDNA tags, and so forth. We therefore modified the procedure to overcome these drawbacks, and applied the improved method to analyze various biological phenomena.
In this review, we present an outline of the method, and describe several studies performed using the method as a major strategic tool.

*Department of Biochemistry, National Defense Medical College, Tokorozawa 359-8513