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Article
Peer Reviewed

RNA editing in Drosophila melanogaster: new targets and functional consequences

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2006)

Article
Peer Reviewed

High-Throughput Plasmid cDNA Library Screening

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2006)

Libraries of cDNA clones are valuable resources for analysing the expression, structure, and regulation of genes, as well as for studying protein functions and interactions. Full-length cDNA clones provide information about intron and exon structures, splice junctions and 5'- and 3'-untranslated regions (UTRs). Open reading frames (ORFs) derived from cDNA clones can be used to generate constructs allowing expression of native proteins and N- or C-terminally tagged proteins. Thus, obtaining full-length cDNA clones and sequences for most or all genes in an organism is critical for understanding genome functions. Expressed sequence tag (EST) sequencing samples cDNA libraries at random, which is most useful at the beginning of large-scale screening projects. However, as projects progress towards completion, the probability of identifying unique cDNAs via EST sequencing diminishes, resulting in poor recovery of rare transcripts. We describe an adapted, high-throughput protocol intended for recovery of specific, full-length clones from plasmid cDNA libraries in five days.

Cover page: High-Throughput Plasmid cDNA Library Screening

Article
Peer Reviewed

Rapid and Efficient cDNA Library Screening by Self-Ligation of Inverse PCR Products (SLIP)

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2005)

The production of comprehensive cDNA clone collections is an important goal of the human and model organism genome projects. cDNA sequences are used to determine the structures of transcripts, including splice junctions, polyadenylation sites, and 5' and 3' untranslated regions (UTRs). cDNA collections are also valuable resources for functional studies of genes and proteins. Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) sequencing is the method of choice for recovering cDNAs representing a majority of the transcripts encoded in a eukaryotic genome. However, EST sequencing samples a library at random, so it realizes diminishing returns as the project progresses. To drive cDNA collections toward completion new methods are needed to recover cDNAs representing specific genes and alternative transcripts, including transcripts with low expression levels. We describe a simple and effective inverse-PCR-based method for screening plasmid libraries to recover intact cDNAs for specific transcripts. We tested the method by screening libraries used in our Drosophila EST projects for 153 transcription factor genes that were not yet represented by full-length cDNAs. We recovered target-specific clones for 104 of the genes: 46 exactly match, 30 improve and 28 partially match current gene annotations. Successful application of the screening method depends on cDNA library complexity and quality of the gene models. The approach should be effective for improving cDNA collections for other model organisms and the human. It also provides a simple and rapid method for isolating cDNAs of interest in any system for which plasmid cDNA libraries and complete or partial gene sequences are available.

Cover page: Rapid and Efficient cDNA Library Screening by Self-Ligation of Inverse PCR Products
(SLIP)

Article
Peer Reviewed

Developmental roles of 21 Drosophila transcription factors are determined by quantitative differences in binding to an overlapping set of thousands of genomic regions

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2009)

Abstract Background We previously established that six sequence-specific transcription factors that initiate anterior/posterior patterning in Drosophila bind to overlapping sets of thousands of genomic regions in blastoderm embryos. While regions bound at high levels include known and probable functional targets, more poorly bound regions are preferentially associated with housekeeping genes and/or genes not transcribed in the blastoderm, and are frequently found in protein coding sequences or in less conserved non-coding DNA, suggesting that many are likely non-functional. Results Here we show that an additional 15 transcription factors that regulate other aspects of embryo patterning show a similar quantitative continuum of function and binding to thousands of genomic regions in vivo. Collectively, the 21 regulators show a surprisingly high overlap in the regions they bind given that they belong to 11 DNA binding domain families, specify distinct developmental fates, and can act via different cis-regulatory modules. We demonstrate, however, that quantitative differences in relative levels of binding to shared targets correlate with the known biological and transcriptional regulatory specificities of these factors. Conclusions It is likely that the overlap in binding of biochemically and functionally unrelated transcription factors arises from the high concentrations of these proteins in nuclei, which, coupled with their broad DNA binding specificities, directs them to regions of open chromatin. We suggest that most animal transcription factors will be found to show a similar broad overlapping pattern of binding in vivo, with specificity achieved by modulating the amount, rather than the identity, of bound factor.

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Cover page: Developmental roles of 21 Drosophila transcription factors are determined by quantitative differences in binding to an overlapping set of thousands of genomic regions

Article
Peer Reviewed

Transcription Factors Bind Thousands of Active and Inactive Regions in the Drosophila Blastoderm

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2008)