Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X Conference Plant, Animal & Microbe Genomes X ConferenceJanuary 12-16, 2002
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Poster: Gene Isolation
The challenge for our biotech company is to establish the transcriptome of grapevine (Vitis vinifera) by isolating and sequencing the nearly complete set of full-length transcripts. We have constructed cDNA libraries from a variety of organs, including berries at different developmental stages. About 20,000 clones have been sequenced so far. Following clustering and Blast search the sequences were annotated and classified into (i) sequences with similarities to proteins with identified functions from other organisms, (ii) sequences with similarities to hypothetical or unknown proteins from other organisms, and (iii) novel sequences with no similarities to available sequences. Sixty percent of the analysed full-length transcripts are similar to genes with known functions.A selection of full-length genes available to the scientific community can be found on our web page www.vitigen.de. We are presently working on increasing the number of available clones, and on establishing a database that can be searched for matches between EST sequences and our full-length cDNAs.We chose Vitis vinifera as our model system since, in contrast to plants like for example Arabidopsis thaliana, grapevine is particularly interesting as it produces berries which contain unique proteins involved in secondary metabolism and in pathways not previously studied as thoroughly at the molecular level. Grapevine is also a woody plant and therefore contains the full set of genes required for wood formation. This work paves the way for functional studies of novel genes. This work was partly supported by the State of Rhineland-Palatinate under the grant ISB 3.3 04-1122.