Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference

Workshop: Aquaculture
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CHARACTERIZATION OF TILAPIA CDNA SEQUENCES

Genomar AS,Oslo Research Park,Gastadalleen 21,0349 Oslo, Norway

As part of tilapia genomics and gene expression studies, we constructed cDNA libraries from 5 different organs, muscle, brain, gills, liver, and kidney, and we have so far sequenced more than 1,000 ESTs from three of five libraries. All cDNAs were size-selected (>300 bp) and were sequenced from 5í¯ end. We obtained ESTs size ranged from 300 to 600 bp. From BLAST search tools of both protein and DNA databases, ESTs from muscle generally show more significant sequence similarity to identified genes (86%) than those from brain (20%) and liver (43%). Most of unidentified sequences are either novel transcripts or matched with unknown identity in the database. These ESTs will provide an efficient way to obtain information about gene expression in specific cell types and also will provide a means for gene discovery for major traits which are important for commercial tilapia breeding programs.