The overall goal of this NSF project is to establish structural tools for apple genomics. The apple, Malus x domestica Borkh., is the most important deciduous tree fruit crop grown in the United States. This project will focus on developing structural genomic research tools with emphasis on flowering, fruiting, and pathogen response in apple. The first phase of this project is to construct an expressed sequence tag (EST) database of 120,000 sequences from flowering and fruiting tissues, and from tissues responding to pathogen infection, specifically to the bacterial pathogen Erwinia amylovora (the causal organism of fire blight disease) and to the fungal pathogen Venturia inaequalis (the causal organism of apple scab disease). These will then be used to generate a set of 30,000 unigene clones that will be subjected to 3' sequencing. An apple genome dataset will be generated and integrated into a national Rosaceae Genome Database. An educational and outreach component of this project will involve developing web-based modules for use in educating high school teachers and students on the concepts structural genomics.
