¹ Plant Metabolism Research Center, Kyung Hee University, Suwon 449-701, Korea

Carthamus tinctorius L. (safflower) has been used as a food colorant, flavoring agent, dye and herbal medicine in oriental countries. To study the metabolic pathways related with these products, we constructed a size-selected cDNA library of mature flower buds in Carthamus tinctorius and sequenced expressed sequence tags (ESTs) of 860 clones randomly selected. On the basis of database searches, 473 (55%) ESTs generated had no homologs in the database while 292 (34%) were shown significant sequence similarities to known genes. The remaining 95 (11%) were uninformative ESTs. A functional catagorization of the database-matched ESTs showed genes that are related in flower development, as well as genes involved in the primary metabolic pathways and in the transcriptional or translational apparatus. Taken together, the EST data from flower buds generated in this study is useful in dissecting gene expression in floral organ of Carthamus tinctorius L.