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Title: THE USE OF ESTS TO ANALYZE THE SPECTRUM OF WHEAT SEED PROTEINS

Author
item Anderson, Olin
item Blake, Victoria
item Chao, Shiaoman
item L Chingcuanco, Debbie
item Lazo, Gerard

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/17/2003
Publication Date: 3/17/2004
Citation: Anderson, O., Carollo, V., Chao, S., Laudencia-Chingcuanco, D., Lazo, G. 2004. The Use of ESTs to Analyze the Spectrum of Wheat Seed Proteins. Proceedings-8th Gluten Workshop. p. 18-21.

Interpretive Summary: Although wheat is one of the foundation crops of the human diet, information on the gene complement of wheat has been relatively lacking. This problem has made it more difficult to apply the most modern technologies to wheat improvement. One such resource is Expressed-Sequence-Tags (ESTs), short sequences of genes. As recently as the year 2000 there were only 8 wheat EST sequences known, as compared to tens to hundreds of thousands for other plants. This problem has been recently alleviated by a worldwide effort to generate a large set of wheat ESTs. The current paper describes the use of these new EST resources to examine wheat seed proteins structure, and several examples are given of the utility of wheat EST resources to yield information on important wheat seed genes and their encoded proteins.

Technical Abstract: In the past few years the number of Triticeae ESTs (Expressed-Sequence-Tags) has gone from less than 100 to over 800,000 wheat, barley, rye and related grass ESTs in the public NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) database. In fact, wheat now has the greatest EST resource of all plants - more than model systems such as rice and Arabidopsis. ESTs are valuable resources for candidate gene identification, gene structure characterization, evolutionary studies, informatics and physical resources for DNA microarray development, gene expression profiling, generation of DNA markers (SNPs, SSRs, RFLP), and genome physical mapping. Among the cDNA libraries used to generate wheat ESTs are many from developing seed, endosperm, and whole grain - all of which would be expected to contribute to a large number of ESTs of the developing endosperm proteins. By analysis of the public ESTs, it is possible to develop detailed information on many aspects of seed genes, their encoded proteins, and relative expression levels by in silico (bioinformatics) methods. Two examples are given for 'mining' the wheat EST resource for novel information on gene structure.