Biomedical Frontiers: Winter 1995, Vol.2, No.2
Herpesvirus Linked to Kaposi's Sarcoma
What is Representational Difference Analysis (RDA)?

RDA was first described by Drs. Nikolai Lisitsyn, Natalya Lisitsyn, and Michael Wigler of Cold Spring Harbor in Science in February 1993 (Vol. 259, p. 946). It is a procedure that analyzes the difference between two complex sets of genomes. By comparing D NA from diseased and normal cells from a person, the method can identify DNA sequences that differ between diseased and normal cells from the same person. Also, it can assess genetic changes that occur during development and detect deletions, rearrangemen ts, or extraneous viral DNA sequences. RDA enriches for unique DNA sequences from one of the genomes by removing shared sequences. It takes advantage of PCR to amplify those distinct regions. In this case RDA and PCR were used to find unique sequences pre sent in KS but not normal tissue from a deceased AIDS patient.

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