Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
            

ESTIMATING AND COMPARING THE NUMBER OF EXPRESSED GENES IN PLANT TISSUES AND GENOMES

¹ Department of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

² Biology and Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

How many genes are being expressed in a tissue at a particular developmental stage? Large-scale EST sequencing projects provide abundant data to effectively address this and other related problems before the entire genome of a species is sequenced. We introduce a statistical method based on Jackknife reasoning to estimate the number of expressed genes in one tissue, multiple tissues and genomes. This method also allows us to evaluate the similarity between tissues from the same species in terms of gene expression. As illustrations, we apply this method to the EST data from multiple plant species such as Arabidopsis thaliana, tomato, rice, wheat, soybean, etc. The number of genes expressed in the genomes will be estimated. The number of genes expressed in different tissues of interest of each species will be compared. These estimates directly show how “similar” these tissues are in gene expression. The research is jointly supported by NSF Grant DMS0104443 and NSF Plant Genome Grant DBI-0115684.