High-density tiling microarray analysis of the full transcriptional activity of yeast

Understanding the relationship between DNA sequence variation and phenotypic variation in complex or quantitative traits is one of the major challenges in modern biology. We are witnessing a deluge of DNA sequence information and association studies of genetic polymorphisms with phenotypes of interest in families and populations. In addition, it has become clear that large portions of eukaryotic genomes beyond protein-coding genes are transcribed, generating numerous noncoding RNA (ncRNA) molecules whose functions remain mostly unknown. DNA oligonucleotide microarrays constitute a powerful technology for studying the expression of genes in different organisms. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae tiling array presents a significant advance over previous array-based platforms. It has a high density of overlapping probes that start on average every 8 bp along each strand of the genome, enabling precise definition of transcript structure. Furthermore, the array includes probes specific for the polymorphic positions of another, distantly related yeast strain, allowing accurate measurement of allele-specific expression in a hybrid of the two strains. This technology thus allows high-resolution, quantitative, strand-and allele-specific measurements of transcription from a full eukaryotic genome. In this chapter, we describe the methods for extracting RNA, synthesizing first-strand cDNA, fragmenting, and labeling of samples for hybridization to the tiling array. Combining genome-wide information on variation in DNA sequence with variation in transcript structure and levels promises to increase our understanding of the genotype-to-phenotype relationship.