Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

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

A Public EST Sequencing Programme For Brassica oleracea

Guy Barker¹ , Carol Ryder² , Rowena Naylor¹ , Rachel Edwards¹ , Andrew Sharpe² , Jonathan Durkin² , Derek Lydiate² , Graham King¹

¹  Warwick HRI, University of Warwick, Wellesbourne, Warwick, CV35 9EF, UK

²  Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 107 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 0X2, Canada

Recent meetings to discuss the future of Brassica research have highlighted the lack of high quality publicly available EST resources for Brassica oleracea as a major limitation to the development of Brassica genomics. To address this imbalance a joint initiative has been set up by Warwick HRI and AAFC, Saskatoon. This EST programme represents a major contribution to the "UK-Canada Collaborative Agreement on Brassica Genomics Research and Utilisation". The aim is to provide 30,000 EST sequences within the next two years from the Brassica oleracea alboglabra A12 DH line, which was chosen due to the avaliabilitiy of high quality physical, genetic and karoytype maps. The EST will be sequenced from a number of different libraries prepared by both AAFC and Warwick HRI in order to maximise the number of genes represented. Sequencing has been initiated using an etiolated seedling library prepared by AAFC Saskatooon. 15,000 clones from this library have been picked and sequenicng carried out by Warwick HRI. Analysis of these sequences with respect to the Brassica oleracea TIGR shotgun sequences and their distribution on the Arabidopsis thaliana genome have been carried out and these will be presented. Such analysis provides an ideal opportunity to clarify the variation attributable to ortholologous versus paralogous loci.