Gene fingerprint

El Fantroussi S, L Verschuere, W Verstraete, EM Top (1999) Effect of phenylurea herbicides on soil microbial communities estimated by analysis of 16S rRNA gene fingerprints and community-level physiological profiles. Appl Environ Microbiol 65 982-988. 

In the human cell there are 23 pairs of chromosomes containing approximately 3000 million base pairs of DNA. Short sequences of DNA, perhaps with as few as 20 nucleotide units and sometimes radiolabeled, can be obtained either by chemical synthesis (gene machine) or from cloning. These short sequences can be used to probe for a complementary sequence by looking for the position to which they bind to any DNA sample under investigation, from blood for example. Such probes can detect as little as 100 fg of DNA and are the basis of forensic genetic fingerprinting tests. 

The major advantage of the tandem mass spectrometry approach compared to MALDI peptide fingerprinting, is that the sequence information obtained from the peptides is more specific for the identification of a protein than simply determining the mass of the peptides. This permits a search of expressed sequence tag nucleotide databases to discover new human genes based upon identification of the protein. This is a useful approach because, by definition, the genes identified actually express a protein. 

Dandekar, T., Snel, B., Huynen, M., and Bork, P. (1998). Conservation of gene order a fingerprint ofproteins that physically interact. Trends Biochem. Sci. 23, 324-328. 

Zajchowski DA et al. Identification of selective estrogen receptor modulators by their gene expression fingerprints. J Biol Chem 2000 275 15885-15894. 

Computational methods have been applied to determine the connections in systems that are not well-defined by canonical pathways. This is either done by semi-automated and/or curated literature causal modeling [1] or by statistical methods based on large-scale data from expression or proteomic studies (a mostly theoretical approach is given by reference [2] and a more applied approach is in reference [3]). Many methods, including clustering, Bayesian analysis and principal component analysis have been used to find relationships and "fingerprints" in gene expression data [4]. 

Allele-specific oligonucleotide Specific alleles of a gene Genetic counseling and DNA fingerprinting... 

Relative mRNA abundance Snapshot of gene activity Surrogate biomarkers or fingerprints Cell cycle... 

Cancer therapeutics — Different tumor types and the differentiated states of individual tumors are known to exhibit xmique gene expression patterns called molecular signatures or fingerprints. The molecular signature may be useful in tumor phenotype classification. 

Bachem, C. W. B., van der Hoeven, R. S., de Bruijn, S. M., Vreugdenhil, D., Zabeau, M., and Visser, R. G. F. (1996). Visualization of differential gene expression using a novel method of RNA fingerprinting based on AFLP Analysis of gene expression during potato tuber development. Plant J. 9, 745-753. 

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