Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

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

Analysis Of Citrus ESTs From Standard And Normalized Full Length cDNA Libraries

Javier Terol¹ , Javier Agustí¹ , Enriqueta Alós¹ , Fernando Andres¹ , Xavier Argout³ , Javier Brumos¹ , Jose A Carrillo¹ , Manuel Cercos¹ , Jose M Colmenero¹ , Vicente Conejero² , Ana Conesa¹ , Brigitte Courtois³ , Carol Dossat⁴ , Domingo Iglesias¹ , Francisco Legaz¹ , Raphael Morillon⁵ , Luis Navarro¹ , Patrick Ollitrault³ , Guillermo Soler¹ , Francisco Tadeo¹ , Patrick Wincker⁴ , Manuel Talon¹

¹  Centro de Genomica, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias. Carretera Moncada - Náquera, Km. 4,5 Moncada (Valencia) E46113. SPAIN

²  Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas

³  Station de Recherche Agronomique INRA-CIRAD. Avenue Agropolis ­ TA 40 / 03 34398 Montpellier Cedex 5, FRANCE

⁴  Genoscope, 2 rue Gaston Cremieux, CP 5706 ­ 911057 Evry Cedex, FRANCE

⁵  Station de Recherche Agronomique INRA-CIRAD, 20230 SanGiuliano, FRANCE

In order to analyze the citrus transcriptome 13 standard and 1 normalized full length cDNA libraries were constructed. The RNA for the generation of the full-length cDNA collection was extracted from Citrus clementina fruits, leaves and roots subjected to different abiotic stresses (mostly drought, salinity and nutritional deficiencies) and at several developmental stages. The 13 standard cDNA libraries were made with RNA extracted from specific tissues (fruit, leaf or root) at particular stages (early development, maturation, senescence) or subjected to a single stress condition (drought, salinity, iron chlorosis). The plant material was collected from Citrus clementina, Cleopatra mandarin and Carrizo citrange. From the normalized full length cDNA library, 37.811 ESTs were single-pass sequenced and for the standard libraries 15.000 readings are expected. The Bioinformatics analysis includes the assembly of the 52.000 readings and the annotation of the unigenes obtained. Several biological aspects of citrus are being addressed through the comparison of the citrus unigene set with those from Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa. Special attention is being taken with sequences that show no similarity with these species. The assembly of the 37.811 ESTs from the normalized full length cDNA library has rendered so far 6499 singletons and 5202 contigs, for a total of about 11700 unigenes. The 15.000 ESTs from the specific cDNA libraries are being currently included in the assembly. An effort is also being made in order to establish the ontologies of the citrus sequences we are analyzing. Details of these studies will be presented in the communication.