In vivo footprinting of plant tissues

The study of DNA regulatory elements and the transcription factors that bind to them is often limited to in vitro studies in cell cultures and indirect evidence. The use of cell cultures is especially problematic in plants because of differentiation and dedifferentiation of the cultures compared to the original tissue. We describe a method to determine if proteins are bound to a regulatory DNA element in intact plant tissue. This method can be used to obtain information about signal transduction and regulation of gene expression in whole plants.