Abstract
Enormous numbers of tomato EST sequences have been deposited in the public databases (e.g., 153,820 in dbEST, Nov., 2004). We have been working on EST sequencing of the miniature tomato cultivar Micro-Tom, which is easy to grow well, even on a laboratory shelf with artificial light, similar to Arabidopsis. Our laboratory had sequenced >40,000 cDNA clones from leaf and fruit cDNA libraries and obtained 35,824 ESTs. In this study, we combined the ESTs with the publicly available tomato ESTs (186,405 ESTs in total) and then assembled them into 26,363 unigenes with a computer program, Phrap. Out of the unigenes we identified 660 and 137 unigenes that have single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and simple sequence repeats (SSRs), respectively. The unigenes that shared homology with Arabiopdis genes were further assigned with GO terms via the Arabidopsis GO-terms. We deposited these results in our Micro-Tom database, which will facilitate functional genomics in tomato.
