This paper describes expression profiles of the Arabidopsis HSP18.2 heat-shock gene promoter by using three different reporter genes, and the application of this promoter to a method we have developed to drive heat-shock-dependent transcription of plant genome DNA flanked by T-DNA insertions. We show that, irrespective of the location of the T-DNA insertion, an HSP18.2 promoter towards the left border of the T-DNA effectively induces transcription of flanking genome sequences in response to heat shock. If polyadenylated, tagged transcripts can be easily identified by RT-PCR.