Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X ConferenceJanuary 12-16, 2002
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
There are a number of large-scale single pass cDNA sequencing entries from annual plants in the NCBI database. However, little EST information from perennial species is available. As of November 2001, 1,100,000 entries ( <5%) of the publicly available sequence information originated from perennial plants. Perennial plants represent a reservoir of EST information most likely not found in annual species. Perrenial plants lack the ability to escape pathological and environmental onslaughts due to their long juvenile periods. Perrenial plants must produce and protect from damage large quantities of biomass to ensure their competitive survival. Tree genomes, especially Citrus, contain genes that encode proteins involved in important traits including: essential oil production, fruit production, dormancy, apomixis, and cold resistance. ESTs are an excellent tool to identify and catalog many of the genes responsible for these important metabolic pathways. We describe here a set of ESTs produced from mRNA isolated from 180-day-old whole juvenile sweet orange (Citrus sinensis L. Osbeck) seedlings. From this library, 6556 random clones were sequenced and analyzed. The data consists of 2561 unique singlets and 922 unique contigs represented by two or more sequences. assemblies with. BLAST analysis indicated that approximately 30% of the sequences have no significant homology to current dbEST entries. The high level of novel sequences in this database set is evidence that perennial trees are an important source of genetic diversity not duplicated in typical annual model plant species.