BMC Genomics

official impact factor 4.21

Open Access Methodology article

Derivation of species-specific hybridization-like knowledge out of cross-species hybridization results

Carmiya Bar-Or1,4, Meira Bar-Eyal2, Tali Z Gal1, Yoram Kapulnik3, Henryk Czosnek4 and Hinanit Koltai1*

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Ornamental Horticulture, ARO Volcani Center, Bet Dagan, Israel

2 Department of Nematology, ARO Volcani Center, Bet Dagan, Israel

3 Depatment of Agronomy & Natural Resources, ARO Volcani Center, Bet Dagan, Israel

4 The Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture, Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel

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BMC Genomics 2006, 7:110 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-7-110

Published: 8 May 2006

Abstract

Background

One of the approaches for conducting genomics research in organisms without extant microarray platforms is to profile their expression patterns by using Cross-Species Hybridization (CSH). Several different studies using spotted microarray and CSH produced contradicting conclusions in the ability of CSH to reflect biological processes described by species-specific hybridization (SSH).

Results

We used a tomato-spotted cDNA microarray to examine the ability of CSH to reflect SSH data. Potato RNA was hybridized to spotted cDNA tomato and potato microarrays to generate CSH and SSH data, respectively. Difficulties arose in obtaining transcriptomic data from CSH that reflected those obtained from SSH. Nevertheless, once the data was filtered for those corresponding to matching probe sets, by restricting proper cutoffs of probe homology, the CSH transcriptome data showed improved reflection of those of the SSH.

Conclusions

This study evaluated the relative performance of CSH compared to SSH, and proposes methods to ensure that CSH closely reflects the biological process analyzed by SSH.