genes of Homo sapience—the human genome), these tags provide qualitative and quantitative characteristics of transcripts in the given transcriptome. So, the serial analysis of gene expression is a method for the comprehensive analysis of gene expression patterns. In contrast to microarray techniques, this method is able to measure not only the relative but the absolute content of the transcripts of a gene, as well as detect any active gene, not just a predefined set placed on a chip. However, laborious and costly cloning and sequencing steps have greatly limited the use of SAGE techniques for large-scale studies of gene expression.
