Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference

January 12-16, 2002
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
            

FUNTIONAL AND COMPARATIVE BIOINFORMATIC ANALYSIS OF EXPRESSED GENES FROM WHEAT AND BARLEY SPIKES INFECTED WITH FUSARIUM GRAMINEARUM

¹ Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108

² Genetica, Facultad de Agronomia, Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo, Uruguay

³ Genetic Resources Conservation Program, University of California, Davis, CA 95616

⁴ Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521

⁵ Clemson University Genomics Institute, Clemson, SC 29634

Fusarium head blight (FHB), caused by Fusarium graminearum, is a serious disease on wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were used to identify genes expressed during the wheat-F. graminearum and barley-F. graminearum interactions. We generated 4,845 ESTs from the partially resistant wheat cultivar Sumai 3 infected with F. graminearum. These ESTs were composed of 2,837 singlet and 715 contigs for a total of 3,552 unigenes. Another 4,870 ESTs were generated from the susceptible barley cultivar Morex infected with F. graminearum. These ESTs were composed of 2,335 singlet and 609 contigs for a total of 2,944 unigenes. Sequence comparisons identified 870 unigenes that are common to these two interactions. Four sets of unigenes were identified from each of these libraries. One set contains biotic and abiotic stress-related genes. Many of these genes occurred as multiple ESTs, indicating that they are upregulated. A second set comprised F. graminearum unigenes that may be required for pathogenicity. A subset of these genes encodes proteins associated with plant cell wall degradation. A third set of unigenes had no DNA or amino acid sequence similarity to over 1 million plant and over 8 million animal sequences in dbEST (October 2001). Thus, these unigenes have only been found in our F. graminearum-infected wheat and barley databases. A fourth set of unigenes was found in our F. graminearum-infected wheat or barley and another plant-pathogen interaction cDNA library. Some of these genes encode proteins that may act in various plant-fungal interactions.