Herein we report our modified approaches. Instead of using the subtracted clones as probes spotted on chips, we directly labeled the enriched amplicons and used them as targets to hybridize the pre-made microarray chips for microarray analysis (named as "SSH/microarray" in this report). This approach allowed us not only to readily identify genes without tremendous sequencing works in the subtracted amplicons regardless of many redundant clones, but also to easily evaluate the subtraction efficiency and specificity. Moreover, the SSH/microarray approach made it possible to conduct a transcriptomewide identification of differentially expressed genes particularly for those with low expression. It has been reported that the absolute expression level is not a crucial determinant for identifying genes, while the relative difference in expression levels does impact on whether or not a gene is recovered by subtractive hybridization [5, 24] . In this report using the SSH/microarray approach, we identified about ten times more of the differentially expressed genes, particularly for those with low expression, in human hepatoma. Our findings successfully demonstrated the transcriptome-wide assays of differentially expressed genes at low abundance. This simple but very powerful approach would greatly facilitate future researches on functional genomics [15, 19, 25] .