Plant & Animal Genome VI Conference Plant & Animal Genome VI Conference
W85
DuPont Agricultural Biotechnology, Delaware Technology Park, Suite 200, 1 Innovation Way, PO Box 6104, Newark, DE 19714-6104
DuPont's EST program provides access to a large number of ESTs from
major crop plants, including corn, soybean, rice, wheat. In addition to
the homology of each EST to genes in Genbank, information about homology
to all ESTs in the DuPont data base is available. This allows us to count
the number of times each gene has been seen in different libraries, from
different tissues, developmental stages or induction conditions. This
quantitation of message levels is quite accurate for highly expressed
messages and, unlike conventional northern blots, allows comparison of
expression levels between different genes. Lists of most highly expressed
genes in different libraries can be compiled. Also, if EST data is available
for cDNA libraries derived from different developmental stages, gene expression
profiles across development can be assembled. We will present examples
of such profiles for soybean seed development.