An improved and cost-effective cDNA-AFLP method to investigate transcription-derived products when high throughput sequencing is not available

Although the cost of high throughput sequencing is decreasing, the cost is still often too high for individual projects targeted at, e.g., genome-wide transcription profiling in non-model organisms. Then, a low-cost alternative is cDNA-AFLP, which we have now considerably modified in order to develop a faster and simpler method to identify and analyze genes involved in specific, possibly adaptive characteristics. Particularly, we wanted to exclude repetitive PCR amplifications, extensive cloning and the presence of overlapping transcripts, which all lower the efficiency of the method.