Abstract
Analysis of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) provides a basis for the discovery of novel genes, and DNA microarray is a powerful tool to comprehensively examine gene expression networks. Although tobacco is still important as a model plant, extensive molecular resources such as genomic sequences, cDNA clones, or ESTs were not available and a microarray approach could not be used. Therefore, we performed EST analysis for tobacco. A full-length cDNA library from young plants of Nicotiana tabacum cv. Xanthi treated with and without a fungal elicitor was constructed using a vector fitted to Gateway system. Over 5,000 colonies were randomly selected and sequenced. A total of 4,762 5'-ESTs were obtained and assembled into 1,668 unique consensus sequences. The ESTs were annotated based on BLASTx search results. A microarray was prepared with a set of the selected full-length cDNAs and used for expression profiling of the corresponding genes in tobacco.
