Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference

Poster: Sequencing & EST
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MINING EST SEQUENCE DATABASES FOR SSRS AND DEVELOPMENT OF MARKERS FOR COMPARATIVE MAPPING

Cornell University, 252 Emerson Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA

Development of a set of common RFLP probes that hybridize among different grasses greatly enhanced our understanding of the cereal genome structure and organization. Several maps have been published using these markers and they have been integrated into numerous plant breeding programs. However, it is a very time consuming and expensive task to generate RFLP maps for every genus and/or cross. Several PCR-based markers have been introduced but none of them work efficiently across species. The recent explosion in EST sequencing of major plant species accumulated a large number of partial gene sequences in the databases. These EST resources are extremely valuable in identification of genes, expression patterns, prediction of gene functions etc. Another use for the genetics community would be to derive a PCR based assay utilizing the wealth of sequence information available in the databases. About 1.5 to 4.5 % of the raw EST sequences contain microsatellites in them. We are attempting to identify microsatellite containing EST sequences from multiple species with a goal to identify a common set of genes that contain EST-SSRs. Subsequently primers will be designed to amplify and map the EST-SSRs among cereals.