Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

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

Poster: Genome Sequencing & ESTs
            

A COMPREHENSIVE MAIZE ENDOSPERM GENE INDEX FOR THE FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS OF ENDOSPERM DEVELOPMENT.

¹ Waksman Institute, Rutgers University, 190 Frelinghuysen Rd, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA

² Dept. of Zoology and Genetics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011

³ Dept. of Plant Science, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721

⁴ Vegetable Crops Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the most important cereal crops in the world. Central to this productivity is the endosperm of the maize kernel. Endosperm not only makes up 85% of the seed weight, but also is a unique triploid tissue that results from double-fertilization. To identify specifically the genes involved in endosperm development, we made cDNA libraries from tissue of a specific genetic background that has been micro-dissected from different developmental stages, 4 to 23 days after pollination. The tissue is derived from a maize inbred line that is used to generate a genetically uniform mutator population so that tagged genes can be linked to cDNA sequences. The libraries have been normalized with two different strategies. As a result cDNAs sequenced from the 3’ end show only a redundancy of roughly 50%. Out of 3,861 tentative unigenes, we identified 1,378 sequences not yet present in the maize EST database. Further analysis of EST sequences is underway.