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Laser Assisted Microdissection, an Efficient Technique to Understand Tissue Specific Gene Expression Patterns and Functional Genomics in Plants

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Abstract

Laser assisted microdissection (LAM) is an advanced technology used to perform tissue or cell-specific expression profiling of genes and proteins, owing to its ability to isolate the desired tissue or cell type from a heterogeneous population. Due to the specificity and high efficiency acquired during its pioneering use in medical science, the LAM technique has quickly been adopted for use in many biological researches. Today, it has become a potent tool to address a wide range of questions in diverse field of plant biology. Beginning with comparative transcriptome analysis of different tissues such as reproductive parts, meristems, lateral organs, roots etc., LAM has also been extensively used in plant-pathogen interaction studies, proteomics, and metabolomics. In combination with next generation sequencing and proteomics analysis, LAM has opened up promising opportunities in the area of large scale functional studies in plants. Ever since the advent of this technique, significant improvements have been achieved in term of its instrumentation and method, which has made LAM a more efficient tool applicable in wider research areas. Here, we discuss the advancement of LAM technique with special emphasis on its methodology and highlight its scope in modern research areas of plant biology. Although we put emphasis on use of LAM in transcriptome studies, which is mostly used, we also discuss its recent application and scope in proteome and metabolome studies.

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Acknowledgments

We thank DBT (Department of Biotechnology, India) for Ramalingaswami Fellowship (#BT/HRD/35/02/06/2008) and NIPGR (National Institute of Plant Genome Research) for facility and internal grants. VG thanks CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India) for fellowship. We thank A.K.S. lab members and S. Barik (IIT Gandhinagar) for critical reading of the manuscript. Since it is beyond the scope, we sincerely apologize for not being able to refer many suppliers/companies/products and many research articles related to the topic.

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  1. National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi, 110067, India

    Vibhav Gautam & Ananda K. Sarkar

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  1. Vibhav Gautam
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Correspondence to Ananda K. Sarkar.

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Gautam, V., Sarkar, A.K. Laser Assisted Microdissection, an Efficient Technique to Understand Tissue Specific Gene Expression Patterns and Functional Genomics in Plants. Mol Biotechnol 57, 299–308 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12033-014-9824-3

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