Abstract
Sugi, Cryptomeria japonica D. Don, is one of the most commercially important conifers, and it covers 44 % of all cultivated forests in Japan. Sugi pollinosis is the most serious allergic disease in Japan. Recently, male-sterile mutants of C. japonica whose pollen is hardly released have been selected. To clarify the molecular mechanisms of male-sterility in C. japonica, we have constructed a full-length cDNA library using normalized RNAs derived from normal male flowers at various developmental stages. We obtained expressed sequence tags (ESTs) of 19,484 cDNA clones. Assembling with PHRAP and BLASTN program resulted that these ESTs represented 10,466 transcripts. Approximately 75% of these transcripts showed similarity (BLASTX E-value ≤ 1e-5) to reported sequences in the public databases such as UniProt and TAIR. We will prepare a DNA microarray using this EST data to analyze the profiles of gene expression in normal and sterile male flowers of C. japonica.
