Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

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

Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
            

EXPRESSED SEQUENCE TAG (EST) ANALYSIS OF THE ROOT cDNA LIBRARY FROM SALT-TOLERANT BARLEY UNDER SALT STRESS

¹ Research Institute for Bioresources, Okayama University, Kurashiki, Okayama 710-0046, Japan

² Core Research Evolutional Science and Technology, Japan Science and Technology Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

A variety of genes have been reported to respond to environmental stresses, however, it is important to confirm the type of the stress-inducible genes whether the gene product functions in stress tolerance or the gene is just induced without contributing to stress tolerance. We have established the expressed sequence tag (EST) database of the salt-tolerant barley in order to define the gene expression profiles and isolate the tolerance-related genes. The cDNA library was constructed from the mRNAs prepared from the roots of salt-tolerant barley treated with 100mM NaCl for 12 h because the root is the organ of land plants mostly affected by salt stress. Randomly selected 6,432 cDNAs were sequenced from both 3' and 5' ends and the ESTs were assembled by the phred/phrap program, resulting 5,726 non-redundant ESTs. The BLAST search analysis (e value < 0.1, score > 100, identity > 80, match-length > 180) showed that 634 of the 5,726 ESTs had significant homology to the genes of the barley, rice, wheat, and maize TIGR GO databases (http://www.tigr.org/, http://www.geneontology.org/). Functional categorization based on the Gene Ontology Consortium assignments of the 634 ESTs showed that about 44.2, 32.0, 11.7, 7.1, and 1.9% are cell (cellular component), cell growth and/or maintenance (biological process), binding (molecular function), enzyme (molecular function), and chaperone (molecular function), respectively.