Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference

Poster: Sequencing & EST
P01_13.html

GENERATION OF A TOMATO (Lycopersicon esculentum) EST DATABASE: CURRENT STATUS AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION

The Institute for Genomic Research, 9712 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA

The goals of this NSF-funded project (#9813392) are to generate a total of 150,000 tomato ESTs, to establish a comprehensive EST database, and to construct a publicly available, non-redundant tomato Gene Index (LeGI; http://www.tigr.org/tdb/lgi). As of October 13, 2000, nearly 96,000 sequences from various cDNA libraries have been made available to the public research community. EST sequencing from 16 libraries has been completed, allowing a detailed analysis of the genes expressed in various tomato tissues. Among the completed libraries are four derived from flower buds at different stages of development, trichome libraries from the wild tomato species L. hirsutum and L. pennellii, germinating seed, fruit at various developmental stages, roots at various developmental stages, ovary tissue, callus tissue, and elicitor and pathogen-challenged leaf tissue. The results of the comparative EST sequence analyses within and between these organs and tissues will be presented. In addition, a development of practical applications based on the generated sequence information will be discussed. This will include a quick electronic identification and further characterization of various sequence motifs present in the expressed portion of the tomato genome. To date a number of different polymorphic microsatellite, or simple sequence repeat (SSR), motifs have been identified, which can be used as co-dominant DNA molecular markers in genome mapping and applied genetics programs.