Wood formation is being increasingly studied at cellular and biochemical levels; however, gene expression and regulation during wood formation re main poorly understood. Up to six types of wood can be studied within the same tree (early wood, late wood, juvenile wood, mature wood, reaction wood and oppo site wood). These six types are characterized by different chemical, physical and anatomical properties. Using the cDNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) technique, we screened several thousand cDNA fragments from differentiating xylem of maritime pine (Pinus pinaster Ait.) comparing early wood vs. late wood and compression wood vs. opposite wood after 8 or 120 days of bending. About 100 transcript-derived fragments (TDFs) showed qualitative or quantitative variations between these different samples. The relative abundance of these TDFs was subsequently analyzed by reverse Northern using RNA derived from early and late wood. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to identify differentially expressed TDFs (P < 0.01) and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction to confirm the differential expression of some TDFs. Among the genes with a known function, transcript expression and nucleotide sequence variation analysis showed a cell wall glycine-rich protein to be a strong candidate gene for wood properties.