Plant & Animal Genome VI Conference

S3

A PROGRESS REPORT ON CORN GENOME PROJECTS AT PIONEER HI-BRED

Pioneer Hi-Bred Int'l, Inc., 7300 NW 62nd Avenue, Johnston, IA 50131

Single-pass, partial sequencing of randomly selected cDNAs to generate expressed sequence tags (ESTs) has been used successfully for gene discovery in many organisms. In March 1996, Pioneer Hi-Bred International and Human Genome Sciences initiated a collaborative corn EST effort. When 124,788 single-pass sequences were clustered using the TIGR Assembler algorithm, 86,686 ESTs were assembled into 15,509 contigs, and 38,102 ESTs remained as singletons. Thus, this dataset contains 53,611 unique sequences. Summary statistics obtained by using the BLAST algorithm will also be presented.