Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

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

Comparative Analysis Of Expressed Sequence Tags From Suspension-Cultured Cells, Roots And Leaves Of Sweetpotato

Gyung Hye Huh¹ , Young-Hwa Kim¹ , Jung Myung Bae² , Cheol-Goo Hur³ , Youn Hee Shin ³

¹  Genome Research Center, Inje University, Gimhae 621-749, Korea

²  Graduate School of Biotechnology, Korea University, Seoul 136-701, Korea

³  Plant genome Lab. Genome Resarch Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Taejon 305-600, Korea

Plants are now gaining widespread acceptance as a general platform for the large-scale production of recombinants proteins. More than 20 pharmaceutical proteins have been produced in plant cell-suspension cultures. Unfortunately, few of these proteins have been expressed at yields sufficient for commercial production. The problem of poor yields could be addressed in part by the use of optimized regulatory elements. Strong promoters in several cultures are required for construction of effective transgene expression system. To identify genes highly expressed in suspension cultures, here cDNA library was constructed with suspension cells of 15 days culture. Single-pass sequences of the 5’ ends of 1431 cDNA clones were assembled into 147 clusters and 1039 singletons. BlastX search revealed that 958 cDNAs out of 1431 showed a high degree of sequence similarity to genes known already. Comparison of suspension cell ESTs was performed with roots and leaves database of sweetpotato. Taken together above analysis, twenty two candidate ESTs were selected and then subjected into Northern analysis. All of them showed high expression in suspension cells compared with leaves. Highly expressed genes in suspension cultures will be good candidates to develop a good expression system.