¹ Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 7 Nanhai Road, Qingdao, 266071, China

² Genomics & Bioinformatics Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Airport Industrial Zone B-6, Beijing, 101300, China

China Shrimp is one of the most commercial important marine species whose genome is still in the least understood. Large-scale sequence of expressed sequence tags has proven to be an efficient approach for identification and characterization of the genes express and also for gene mapping. From an adult Fenneropenaeus chinensis cephalothorax cDNA library cloned in plasmid vector PUC18 (donated by Genomics & Bioinformatics Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing ), we generated 10,443 ESTs. Of these, 3,665 ESTs matched to known genes (35.08%), 1,504 matched only to other invertebrate ESTs (14.40%), and 5,277 ESTs showed no match to any ESTs and known genes (50.52%). STACKPACK(v2.1 Electric Genetics PTY Ltd.) was used to clustering the ESTs, 9,327 ESTs clustered into 1119 unique genes whereas the remaining 2,331 did not cluster. This estimates the number of unique genes to approximately 3,450. The unique genes were analyzed by BLAST using NCBI database. A total of 282 unique genes matched to known genes. The remaining 3,168 are unknown genes. To analyze the potential function of the Fenneropenaeus chinensis ESTs, 225 known genes were categorized into eight categories: 51 in gene/protein expression (23.11%), 49 in Cell structure/motility (21.78%), 15 hemocyanin (6.67), 12 in Cell/organism defense (5.33%), 35 in Metabolism (15.56%), 8 in Cell division (3.55%), 5 in Cell signaling/communication (2.22%), genes lacking enough information to be classified constituted the remaining 50 genes (22.22%). More than 2000 of the ESTs have already been deposited in the GenBank, the other should be deposited soon.