Comparative Analysis and EST Mining Reveals High Degree of Conservation among Five Brassicaceae Species.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Comparative and Functional Genomics Volume 2010, Article ID 520238, 13 pages doi:10.1155/2010/520238 Research Article Comparative Analysis and EST Mining Reveals High Degree of Conservation among Five Brassicaceae Species Jyotika Bhati, Humira Sonah, Tripta Jhang, Nagender Kumar Singh, and Tilak Raj Sharma Genoinformatics Laboratory, National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, Pusa Campus (IARI), New Delhi 110012, India Correspondence should be addressed to Tilak Raj Sharma, trsharma@ Received 30 January 2010; Revised 21 May 2010; Accepted 11 July 2010 Academic Editor: Graziano Pesole Copyright © 2010 Jyotika Bhati et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Brassicaceae is an important family of the plant kingdom which includes several plants of major economic importance. The Brassica spp. and Arabidopsis share much-conserved colinearity between their genomes which can be exploited for the genomic research in Brassicaceae crops. In this study, 131,286 ESTs of five Brassicaceae species were assembled into unigene contigs and compared with Arabidopsis gene indices. Almost all the unigenes of Brassicaceae species showed high similarities with Arabidopsis genes except those of B. napus, where 90% of unigenes were found similar. A total of 9,699 SSRs were identified in the unigenes. PCR primers were designed based on this information and amplified across species for validation. Functional annotation of unigenes showed that the majority of the genes are present in metabolism and energy functional classes. It is expected that comparative genome analysis between Arabidopsis and re