Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Characterisation Of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) From A NaCl And UV-Treated Muskmelon (Cucumis melo L.) cDNA Library

Weng Wah Lee¹ , Chai Leng Ho¹ , Harikrishna Kulaveerasingam ² , Siang Hee Tan²

¹  Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Food Science and Biotechnology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, UPM Serdang, 43400, Malaysia

²  Sime Darby Technology Centre Sdn Bhd, 2, Jalan Tandang, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, 46050 Malaysia

Past efforts to improve plant tolerance to osmotic stress and disease resistance through breeding and genetic engineering have shown limited success owing to the genetic complexity of stress responses. The first step towards cataloging and categorizing genetically complex abiotic stress responses is the rapid discovery of gene by the large-scale partial sequencing of random selected cDNA clones or expressed sequence tags (ESTs). Cold plaque hybridization using non-induced cDNA as probe to screen for more stringent stress-related gene was performed. A total of 550 ESTs were generated from a stress-induced (200 mM NaCl and 250 nm UV-treated) cDNA library with cDNA insert size ranging between 500-2500bp. Functional categorization of the database-matched ESTs showed majority of genes are involved in salinity regulatory as well as in the plant defense mechanism in translation of mRNAs. The results apparently showed that generation of the stress-induced ESTs by partial sequencing of random clones along with the expression analysis was an efficient approach to isolate genes that are responsible for salt tolerance and disease resistance in large scale. We believed that our dbEST and the associated DNA materials will be a useful source to scientist engaging in stress-tolerance and disease resistance study.