Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference

Poster: Sequencing & EST
P01_10.html

STATUS OF THE PUBLIC PINUS TAEDA (LOBLOLLY PINE) EST PROJECT

¹ Forest Biotechnology Group, North Carolina State University, 840 Main Campus Dr., Suite 2500, Raleigh, NC 27695-7247, U.S.A.

² Academic Computing and Bioinformatics, AHC, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0312, U.S.A.

Gene discovery by single-pass sequencing of cDNA clones can be a productive, initial approach to developing a research resource base in species that are currently intractable to full-scale genome sequencing. In the fall of 1999, a multi-institutional project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, was initiated to apply genomic methods to study the molecular basis of wood formation in Pinus taeda L. (loblolly pine). Our first goal is to sequence 80,000 cDNA templates in order to obtain a large number of ESTs from differentiating xylem during rapid growth and under different environmental stresses. To date, well over 30,000 templates have been sequenced, with about 80% generating useful ESTs. These templates have been sequenced from three differentiating xylem cDNA libraries (normal wood, compression wood, and side wood), and three corresponding deep EST data libraries have been assembled and contigged (using phredphrap) from this EST data. The EST data libraries are freely available to the worldwide research community at the URL www.cbc.umn.edu/ResearchProjects/Pine/nsfpine99/index.html, and the individual EST sequences are available at both the above URL and through GenBank. A detailed overview of the EST results obtained thus far is presented here.