Detection and quantitative analysis of actin mRNA by in situ hybridization with an oligodeoxynucleotide probe

In situ hybridization is a useful method for localizing specific nucleic acid sequences intracellularly and for studying regulation of gene expression. Recently synthetic oligonucleotides have been successfully used as probes in this technique. Since they can be made easily to specific nucleic acid regions, they may be the best approach for analysis of a gene family of highly conserved sequences. They have analyzed these probes for the development of an in situ hybridization method. Oligonucleotides were made to different regions of chick beta-actin mRNA and used for detection of these sequences in a culture of chicken fibroblasts and myoblasts. They found that synthetic DNAs have different efficiencies of hybridization, indicating that not all target sequences are equivalent. They have investigated in detail a particular probe to the actin mRNA coding region and have optimized hybridization parameters. When hybridization was quantitated it was found that an oligonucleotide end labelled with 35S or 32P was capable of detecting several thousand messages per cell with a signal-to-noise ratio of 10:1. In situ hybridization confirmed the specificity of the hybridization as well as the background level. Increase in the number of oligonucleotides used should increase the signal-to-noise ratio-proportionately. Under particular circumstances the specificity of oligonucleotides make them an important reagent for in situ hybridization