Cloning of the 3 Noncoding Regions from Several Members of Heat Shock Protein Gene Families by Differential Display

Several structural and metabolically important proteins in eukaryotes are encoded by multigene families. For understanding the function of each member of a gene family, it is essential to isolate the representative cDNAs encoding the protein of interest. In the past, this has been especially difficult owing to highly similar protein coding region of the cDNAs from a gene family with minute variations in their amino acid composition. The 3′ noncoding regions from different members of a gene family, however, show sufficient heterogeneity that can be harnessed for the isolation and characterization of different members of a gene family. Higher plant genes offer a special advantage because the 3′ noncoding regions of their cDNAs are generally shorter than 300 bp in length (1 ). Plant cDNAs are, therefore, easily amenable to differential display analysis.