Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

A Full-Length cDNA Sequence Resource For The Functional Genomics Of Maize Endosperm Development

Jinsheng Lai¹ , Nrisingha Dey² , Cheol-Soo Kim³ , Stephen Rudd⁴ , Klaus F.X. Mayer⁴ , Brian Larkins³ , Philip Becraft² , Don McCarty⁵ , Joachim Messing¹

¹  Waksman Institute, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ 08854

²  Department of Genetics, Development & Cell Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011

³  Department of Plant Science, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721

⁴  Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences, Institute for Bioinformatics, GSF Research Center for Environment and Health, Neuherberg, Germany

⁵  Vegetable Crops Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611

The cereal endosperm is a major organ of the seed and an important component of the world’s food supply. To understand the development and physiology of the endosperm of cereal seeds, we focused on the identification of genes expressed at various times during maize endosperm development. We constructed several cDNA libraries to identify full-length clones and subjected them to a two-fold enrichment. A total of 23,348 high quality sequence-reads from 5’ and 3’ ends of cDNAs were generated and assembled into a unigene set representing 5,326 genes with paired sequence-reads. Additional sequencing using specific primers yielded a total of 3,160 (59%) completely sequenced, full-length cDNAs. At the same time, more than 34,000 MuTail sequences from insertion events of the UniformMu populations have been generated. A detail analysis of the full-length cDNA with the Mutail sequences will be presented.