The Generation of a Tomato EST Database. The tomato plant has long been a popular species for various aspects of plant biology research including genetics, development, physiology and pathology. Today much of the research on tomato concentrates on fruit development and pathogen response since in these areas tomato still stands out as an ideal model. In recent years, genomics has risen to the forefront of modern biological research and now provides great opportunities for plant biology. One of the most widely used genomics approaches is to generate Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) from an organism. These are short sequences obtained from cDNA clones selected at random and are a very cost effective way of identifying a large number of genes expressed in a tissue. Once generated these sequences are a valuable resource for a large number of experimental approaches including mapping, expression studies, and genome annotation. This project will generate 90,000 ESTs from a variety of tomato tissues including core tissues present in most plants (shoots, roots, developing anthers and ovules, and developing seeds), as well as tissues of particular interest to tomato researchers such as ripening fruits, and diseased tissues. These 90,000 sequences will be used to construct a tomato EST database in which the ESTs from the same gene are grouped together and treated as a single entity. These will then be annotated to identify possible functions of each gene. Information about the source of each EST will also be part of this database, and therefore it will be possible to identify tissue-specific genes, and genes switched on in response to attacking pathogens. It is expected that the sequences and the clones from this project will become part of the collection of tools used by tomato researchers, and indeed researchers working on any number of other species.
Deliverables (source): 1. 150,000 tomato EST sequences (GenBank) 2. Publicly-accessible database of assembled and annotated tomato ESTs/cDNAs, updated quarterly (TIGR tomato Gene Index; www.tigr.org/tdb/tgi/lgi/).
