While lacZ has previously been used as a reporter gene in an amperometric bioassay, nuoA is a novel and more sensitive reporter gene.
Namely, we examine the extent to which different codons (or their amino acids) encapsulate the evolutionary age signal and ask which codons are more "sensitive" to gene age, across the three metazoan representatives examined.
If the X chromosome is inherently less or more sensitive to gene dosage reduction than autosomes, then we should observe differences between the dosage responses of chromosome X and 3L in XX females and in XX females transformed into males.
A gene-based test might potentially be more sensitive to genes with multiple, less common variants having individually small effects on the phenotype.
It is important to understand that using a statistical cut-off to generate a list of DE genes from aggregated tag counts inevitably will be more sensitive to genes with longer transcripts.
Specific strategies for pathway analysis (such as SEA, FSC and PT-based methods that test the collective activity of sets of functionally related genes as defined in GO, KEGG, etc)., despite more sensitive than gene-based approaches, still provide a very poor detail on the actual functionalities affected in the cell.
The use of more sensitive and gene-specific RT-qPCR technique enabled us to study relative abundance of the three highly homologous CHS gene family transcripts in virus-infected grapevine leaves.
Target genes that are revealed by the genomics/transcriptomics screens are generally validated by reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), which is more quantitative and more reproducible than microarray, requires less mRNA and is more sensitive for genes that are expressed at low levels.
Comparing with ESTs and SAGE technologies, MPSS has its advantages that it can provide a more thorough and scientific representation of the absolute transcript population, and is more sensitive to genes expressed at low levels due to deep sequencing with the resultant dataset containing more than 6 million tags for each sample in this study (also discussed in [ 38]).
