Single-probe RNA FISH in Yeast.

Quantitative profiling of mRNA expression is an important part of understanding the state of a cell. The technique of RNA Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) involves targeting an RNA transcript with a set of 40 complementary fluorescently labeled DNA oligonucleotide probes. However, there are many circumstances such as transcripts shorter than 200 nt, splicing variations, or alternate initiation sites that create transcripts that would be indistinguishable to a set of multiple probes. To this end we adapted the standard FISH protocol to allow the use of a single probe with a single fluorophore to quantify the amount of transcripts inside budding yeast cells. In addition to allowing the quantification of short transcripts or short features of transcripts, this technique reduces the cost of performing FISH.