Heterologous microarrays for the study of drought stress in Musa. Musa sp.

'Systems-wide' approaches such as microarray RNA-profiling are ideally suited to the study of the complex, overlapping responses of plants to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, commercial microarrays are only available for a limited number of plant species and development costs are so substantial as to be prohibitive for most research groups. Here, we evaluate the use of cross-hybridisation to Affymetrix oligonucleotide GeneChip microarrays to profile the response of the banana (Musa sp.) leaf transcriptome to drought stress using a genomic DNA (gDNA)-based probe-selection strategy to improve the efficiency of detection of differentially expressed Musa transcripts. Overall design: GeneChip analyses were performed to profile the response of the banana (Musa sp.) leaf transcriptome to drought stress using a genomic DNA (gDNA)-based probe-selection strategy to improve the efficiency of detection of differentially expressed Musa transcripts.