Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

A Newly Developed Agilent Microarray Designed For The Characterization Of Citrus Responses To Pathogens

Gloria A Moore¹ , Vincente J Febres¹ , Abeer A Khalaf^1,2 , Li Liu¹ , Frederick G Gmitter, Jr.²

¹  University of Florida POB 110690 Gainesville, FL, 32611 USA

²  University of Florida Citrus Research and Education Center Lake Alfred, FL 33850 USA

We have constructed a new citrus microarray, with the expert aid of scientists at the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR), University of Florida, and Agilent Technologies Inc, Palo Alto, CA. The advantages of this array lie in improved technology in its construction, the possibility of including all of the Rutaceae ESTs currently in the NCBI Genbank (more than 474,000), and the further addition of mRNAs for genes that we have identified that may impact defense against pathogens in Citrus. The Rutaceae ESTs and mRNAs were first cleaned, clustered, and assembled. All of the resulting contigs and singlets were annotated by BLAST search against NCBI NR and NT databases. The Rutaceae transcripts were mapped to homologs from Arabidopsis, rice, corn, human, mouse or other organisms with descending priorities. The final set of target sequences included: forward strands of orientation determined, annotated transcripts; both strands for orientation-undetermined, annotated transcripts; and both strands for unannotated transcripts. Agilent procedures were used to design 60-mer probes for each sequence. The probes were printed in a 4x44K format with random layout. The array is currently being evaluated in experiments designed and performed in our laboratory. It is our intention, once we have verified the utility of the array, to make it available to any interested member of the citrus community.