Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

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

Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
            

AN EXPRESSED SEQUENCE TAG (EST) PROJECT ON NICOTIANA BENTHAMIANA

¹ College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695

² Philip Morris USA, Richmond, VA 23261

Nicotiana benthamiana, an amphiploid species with 38 chromosomes, is closely related to cultivated tobacco (N. tabacum) and is a member of the Solanaceae family, which also includes eggplant, pepper, petunia, potato, and tomato. N. benthamiana is an important model host to study plant disease interactions. It has been particularly valuable in the elucidation of plant-virus interactions, as well as with the ongoing characterization of gene silencing. Several cDNA libraries have been constructed from expanding leaf tissue. To date more than 17,000 ESTs have been sequenced from the pooled libraries. A database and an automated pipeline comprising sequence and cluster analysis tools has been designed, constructed and implemented. At this point, 6225 unique singlets and 1218 unique contigs representing two or more sequences have been elucidated by cluster analysis. BLAST analysis indicated that more than 30% of the sequences have no significant homology to sequences currently in the database. The long-term goal of this program, to create a unigene set of greater than 15,000 sequences publicly available to the scientific community. Our specific goals are to identify genes involved in plant virus pathogenesis and host-pathogen interaction.