Mining of SSR markers from Expressed Sequence Tags of bamboo species

With the ever increasing number of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) from various sequencing projects, ESTs have become valuable and first-hand source of in-silico mining of simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers. We examined a total of 3419 EST sequences from three bamboo species, namely, Phyllostachys edulis, Bambusa oldhamii and Dendrocalamus sinicus for the presence of di- to hexa- microsatellites. The frequency of SSR containing ESTs varied from 5.36% in B. oldhamii to 13.05% in P. edulis. No SSRs were found in D. sinicus. Tri-nucleotide repeats (49.34%) were most frequent in P. edulis, while not much comparable difference in repeats was found in B. oldhamii. Flanking primer pairs were also designed in-silico for the sequences containing SSRs and their position on the genome hypothesized using similarity searching. SSRs located in open reading frame (ORF) were given functional annotation using Gene Ontology. Polymorphic SSRs were also detected using new pipeline- polySSR. Polymorphism level was very low (2.43%) and the position of the polymorphic SSRs was determined. The development of SSRs and the study of polymorphism will help in the further study of intra- and inter- gene flow, genetic structure, variability, linkage mapping and evolutionary relationships in bamboo.     

ESMP: A high-throughput computational pipeline for mining SSR markers from ESTs

With the advent of high-throughput sequencing technology, sequences from many genomes are being deposited to public databases at a brisk rate. Open access to large amount of expressed sequence tag (EST) data in the public databases has provided a powerful platform for simple sequence repeat (SSR) development in species where sequence information is not available. SSRs are markers of choice for their high reproducibility, abundant polymorphism and high inter-specific transferability. The mining of SSRs from ESTs requires different high-throughput computational tools that need to be executed individually which are computationally intensive and time consuming. To reduce the time lag and to streamline the cumbersome process of SSR mining from ESTs, we have developed a user-friendly, web-based EST-SSR pipeline "EST-SSR-MARKER PIPELINE (ESMP)". This pipeline integrates EST pre-processing, clustering, assembly and subsequently mining of SSRs from assembled EST sequences. The mining of SSRs from ESTs provides valuable information on the abundance of SSRs in ESTs and will facilitate the development of markers for genetic analysis and related applications such as marker-assisted breeding. AVAILABILITY: The database is available for free at http://bioinfo.aau.ac.in/ESMP.     

Towards an efficient computational mining approach to identify EST-SSR markers

Microsatellites are the markers of choice due to their high abundance reproducibility, degree of polymorphism and co-dominant nature. These are mainly used for studying the genetic variability in different species and Marker assisted selection. Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) serve as the main resource for Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs). The computational approach for detecting SSRs and developing SSR markers from EST-SSRs is preferred over the conventional methods as it reduces time and cost to a great extent. The available EST sequence databases, various web interfaces and standalone tools provide the platform for an easy analysis of the EST sequences leading to the development of potential EST-SSR Markers. This paper is an overview of in silico approach to develop SSR Markers from the EST sequence using some of the most efficient tools that are available freely for academic purpose.     

Mining and charactering microsatellites in Cucumis melo expressed sequence tags from sequence database

Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) derived from expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are valuable markers because they represent transcribed regions and often have putative functions. We mined and characterized microsatellites in melon ESTs. Three hundred and eighty‐three SSR loci were identified in 309 of 3188 unigenes assembled by 5747 EST and mRNA sequences in GenBank with occurring frequency of 1/4.7 kb. Twenty‐two polymorphic EST‐SSR markers were developed with the mean allele number of 2.9 per locus and mean expected heterozygosity of 0.442. Amplification products were also detected by 15 pairs of primer in Cucumis sativus. Those informative EST‐SSR markers can be used in melon genetic improvement projects.     

茶树EST-SSRs分布特征及引物开发

为了在茶树中开发EST-SSRs功能性标记,利用生物信息学方法对NCBI网上公开的3288奈茶树（Camellia subebsus）ESTs序列进行EST-SSRs特征分析。剔除冗余序列,得到非冗余序列2083条。在非冗余序列中发现含不同重复基元SSRs的EST序列有385条,共486个EST-SSRs,平均相隔2．10kb出现1个SSR。在2～6bp的重复基元中,二核苷酸重复基元的SSRs出现频率最高（51．97％）,其次是三核苷酸（19．55％）。对所有的重复基元类型进行统计分析发现,所占比例最高的是AG／CT（47．74％）,其次分别是AT／TA（4．73％）和AAG／CTT（4．73％）。利用Prime5软件,设计了206对EST-SSRs引物,随机选用72对引物进行SSR扩增,发现31对引物可以扩增出条带,其中29对引物具有多态性,多态性比率为93．5％。这些EST-SSRs将有助于茶树基因组学方面的研究。     

Identification and characterization of SSRs from soybean (Glycine max) ESTs

Microsatellites, or simple sequence repeats (SSRs), are very useful molecular markers for a number of plant species. We used a new publicly available module (TROLL) to extract microsatellites from the public database of soybean expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences. A total of 12,833 sequences containing di- to penta-type SSRs were identified from 200,516 non-redundant soybean ESTs. On average, one SSR was found per 7.25?kb of EST sequences, with the tri-nucleotide motifs being the most abundant. Primer sequences flanking the SSR motifs were successfully designed for 9,638 soybean ESTs using the software primer3.0 and only 59 pairs of them were found in earlier studies. We synthesized 124 pairs of the primers to determine the polymorphism and heterozygosity among eight genotypes of soybean cultivars, which represented a wide range of the cultivated soybean cultivars. PCR amplification products with anticipated SSRs were obtained with 81 pairs of primers; 36 PCR products appeared to be homozygous and the remaining 45 PCR products appeared to be heterozygous and displayed polymorphism among the eight cultivars. We further analysed the EST sequences containing 45 polymorphic EST-SSR markers using the programs BLASTN and BLASTX. Sequence alignment showed that 29 ESTs have homologous sequences and 15 ESTs could be classified into a Uni-gene cluster with comparatively convincing protein products. Among these 15 ESTs belonging to a Uni-gene cluster, 9 SSRs were located in 3'-UTR, 4 SSRs were located in the intron region and 2 SSRs were located in the CDS region. None of these SSRs was located in the 5'-UTR. These novel SSRs identified in the ESTs of soybean provide useful information for gene mapping and cloning in future studies.     

SSR mining in coffee tree EST databases: potential use of EST-SSRs as markers for the Coffea genus

Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from Coffea canephora leaves and fruits were used to search for types and frequencies of simple sequence repeats (EST–SSRs) with a motif length of 1–6 bp. From a non-redundant (NR) EST set of 5,534 potential unigenes, 6.8% SSR-containing sequences were identified, with an average density of one SSR every 7.73 kb of EST sequences. Trinucleotide repeats were found to be the most abundant (34.34%), followed by di- (25.75%) and hexa-nucleotide (22.04%) motifs. The development of unique genic SSR markers was optimized by a computational approach which allowed us to eliminate redundancy in the original EST set and also to test the specificity of each pair of designed primers. Twenty-five EST–SSRs were developed and used to evaluate cross-species transferability in the Coffea genus. The orthology was supported by the amplicon sequence similarity and the amplification patterns. The >94% identity of flanking sequences revealed high sequence conservation across the Coffea genus. A high level of polymorphic loci was obtained regardless of the species considered (from 75% for C. liberica to 86% for C. canephora). Moreover, the polymorphism revealed by EST–SSR was similar to that exposed by genomic SSR. It is concluded that Coffea ESTs are a valuable resource for microsatellite mining. EST-SSR markers developed from C. canephora sequences can be easily transferred to other Coffea species for which very little molecular information is available. They constitute a set of conserved orthologous markers, which would be ideal for assessing genetic diversity in coffee trees as well as for cross-referencing transcribed sequences in comparative genomics studies.     

Large-scale identification of polymorphic microsatellites using an <Emphasis Type="Italic">in silico</Emphasis> approach

Background  

Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) or microsatellite markers are valuable for genetic research. Experimental methods to develop SSR markers are laborious, time consuming and expensive. In silico approaches have become a practicable and relatively inexpensive alternative during the last decade, although testing putative SSR markers still is time consuming and expensive. In many species only a relatively small percentage of SSR markers turn out to be polymorphic. This is particularly true for markers derived from expressed sequence tags (ESTs). In EST databases a large redundancy of sequences is present, which may contain information on length-polymorphisms in the SSR they contain, and whether they have been derived from heterozygotes or from different genotypes. Up to now, although a number of programs have been developed to identify SSRs in EST sequences, no software can detect putatively polymorphic SSRs.     

Frequency, type, distribution and annotation of simple sequence repeats in Rosaceae ESTs

Genomic resources for peach, a model species for Rosaceae, are being developed to accelerate gene discovery in other Rosaceae species by comparative mapping. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are an important tool for comparative mapping because of their high polymorphism and transportability. To accelerate the development of SSR markers, we analyzed publicly available Rosaceae expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for SSRs. A total of 17,284 ESTs from almond, peach and rose were assembled into putatively non-redundant EST sets. For comparison, 179,099 ESTs from Arabidopsis were also used in the analysis. About 4% of the assembled ESTs contained SSRs in Rosaceae, which was higher than the 2.4% found in Arabidopsis. About half of the SSRs were found in the putative UTR, and the estimated average distance between SSRs in the UTR was 5.5 kb in rose, 5.1 kb in almond, 7 kb in peach and 13 kb in Arabidopsis. In the putative coding region, the estimated average distance was two to four times longer than in the UTR. Rosaceae ESTs containing SSRs were functionally annotated using the GenBank nr database and further classified using the gene ontology terms associated with the matching sequences in the SwissProt database. The detailed data including the sequences and annotation results are available from .     

Mining and survey of simple sequence repeats in expressed sequence tags of dicotyledonous species.

Simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers are widely used in many plant and animal genomes due to their abundance, hypervariability, and suitability for high-throughput analysis. Development of SSR markers using molecular methods is time consuming, laborious, and expensive. Use of computational approaches to mine ever-increasing sequences such as expressed sequence tags (ESTs) in public databases permits rapid and economical discovery of SSRs. Most of such efforts to date focused on mining SSRs from monocotyledonous ESTs. In this study, we have computationally mined and examined the abundance of SSRs in more than 1.54 million ESTs belonging to 55 dicotyledonous species. The frequency of ESTs containing SSRs among species ranged from 2.65% to 16.82%. Dinucleotide repeats were found to be the most abundant followed by tri- or mono-nucleotide repeats. The motifs A/T, AG/GA/CT/TC, and AAG/AGA/GAA/CTT/TTC/TCT were the predominant mono-, di-, and tri-nucleotide SSRs, respectively. Most of the mononucleotide SSRs contained 15-25 repeats, whereas the majority of the di- and tri-nucleotide SSRs contained 5-10 repeats. The comprehensive SSR survey data presented here demonstrates the potential of in silico mining of ESTs for rapid development of SSR markers for genetic analysis and applications in dicotyledonous crops.     

Development,Characterization and Cross Species Amplification of Polymorphic Microsatellite Markers from Expressed Sequence Tags of Turmeric (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Curcuma longa</Emphasis> L.)

Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from turmeric (Curcuma longa L.) were used for the screening of type and frequency of Class I (hypervariable) simple sequence repeats (SSRs). A total of 231 microsatellite repeats were detected from 12,593 EST sequences of turmeric after redundancy elimination. The average density of Class I SSRs accounts to one SSR per 17.96 kb of EST. Mononucleotides were the most abundant class of microsatellite repeat in turmeric ESTs followed by trinucleotides. A robust set of 17 polymorphic EST–SSRs were developed and used for evaluating 20 turmeric accessions. The number of alleles detected ranged from 3 to 8 per loci. The developed markers were also evaluated in 13 related species of C. longa confirming high rate (100%) of cross species transferability. The polymorphic microsatellite markers generated from this study could be used for genetic diversity analysis and resolving the taxonomic confusion prevailing in the genus.     

Development of SSR markers for the phylogenetic analysis of almond trees from China and the Mediterranean region.

Expressed sequence tag (EST) derived simple sequence repeats (SSRs, microsatellites) were screened and identified from 3863 almond and 10 185 peach EST sequences, and the spectra of SSRs in the non-redundant EST sequences were investigated after sequence assembly. One hundred seventy-eight (12.07%) almond SSRs and 497 (9.97%) peach SSRs were detected. The EST-SSR occurs every 4.97 kb in almond ESTs and 6.57 kb in peach, and SSRs with di- and trinucleotide repeat motifs are the most abundant in both almond and peach ESTs. Twenty one EST-SSRs were thereafter, developed and used together with 7 genomic SSRs, to study the genetic relationship among 36 almond (P. communis Fritsch.) cultivars from China and the Mediterranean area, as well as 8 accessions of other related species from the genus Prunus. Both EST-derived and genomic SSR markers showed high cross-species transferability in the genus. Out of the 112 polymorphic alleles detected in the 36 cultivated almonds, 28 are specific to Chinese cultivars and 25 to the others. The 44 accessions were clustered into 4 groups in the phylogenetic tree and the 36 almond cultivars formed two distinct subgroups, one containing only Chinese cultivars and one of unknown origin and the other only those originating from the Mediterranean area, indicating that Chinese almond cultivars have a distinct evolutionary history from the Mediterranean almond. Our preliminary results indicated that common almond was more closely related to peach (P. persica (L.) Batsch.) than to the four wild species of almond, (P. mongolica Maxim., P. ledebouriana Schleche, P. tangutica Batal., and P. triloba Lindl.). The implications of these SSR markers for evolutionary analysis and molecular mapping of Prunus species are discussed.     

Distribution and characterization of simple sequence repeats in Gossypium raimondii genome

Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) can be derived from the complete genome sequence. These markers are important for gene mapping as well as marker-assisted selection (MAS). To develop SSRs for cotton gene mapping, we selected the complete genome sequence of Gossypium raimondii, which consisted of 4447 non-redundant scaffolds. Out of 775.2 Mb sequence examined, a total of 136,345 microsatellites were identified with a density of 5.69 kb per SSR in the G. raimondii genome leading to development of 112,177 primer pairs. The distributions of SSRs in the genome were non-random. Among the different motifs ranging from 1 to 6 bp, penta-nucleotide repeats were most abundant (30.5%), followed by tetra-nucleotide repeats (18.2%) and di-nucleotide repeats (16.9%). Among all identified 457 motif types, the most frequently occurring repeat motifs were poly-AT/TA, which accounted for 79.8% of the total di-nt SSRs, followed by AAAT/TTTA with 51.5% of the total tetra-nucleotede. Further, 18,834 microsatellites were detected from the protein-coding genes, and the frequency of gene containing SSRs was 46.0% in 40,976 genes of G. raimondii. These genome-based SSRs developed in the present study will lay the groundwork for developing large numbers of SSR markers for genetic mapping, gene discovery, genetic diversity analysis, and MAS breeding in cotton.     

Development of microsatellite markers in autopolyploid sugarcane and comparative analysis of conserved microsatellites in sorghum and sugarcane

Sugarcane has become an increasingly important first-generation biofuel crop in tropical and subtropical regions. It has a large, complex, polyploid genome that has hindered the progress of genomic research and marker-assisted selection. Genetic mapping and ultimately genome sequence assembly require a large number of DNA markers. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are widely used in genetic mapping because of their abundance, high rates of polymorphism, and ease of use. The objectives of this study were to develop SSR markers for construction of a saturated genetic map and to characterize the frequency and distribution of SSRs in a polyploid genome. SSR markers were mined from expressed sequence tag (EST), reduced representation library genomic sequences, and bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences. A total of 5,675 SSR markers were surveyed in a segregating population. The overall successful amplification and polymorphic rates were 87.9 and 16.4%, respectively. The trinucleotide repeat motifs were most abundant, with tri- and hexanucleotide motifs being the most abundant for the ESTs. BAC and genomic SSRs were mostly AT-rich while the ESTs were relatively GC-rich due to codon bias. These markers were also aligned to the sorghum genome, resulting in 1,203 markers mapped in the sorghum genome. This set of SSRs conserved in sugarcane and sorghum would be the most informative for mapping quantitative trait loci in sugarcane and for comparative genomic analyses. This large collection of SSR markers is a valuable resource for sugarcane genomic research and crop improvement.     

An in silico mining for simple sequence repeats from expressed sequence tags of zebrafish, medaka, Fundulus, and Xiphophorus

Teleost fish genome projects involving model species are resulting in a rapid accumulation of genomic and expressed DNA sequences in public databases. The expressed sequence tags (ESTs) collected in the databases can be mined for the analysis of both structural and functional genomics. In this study, we in silico analyzed 49,430 unigenes representing a total of 692,654 ESTs from four model fish for their potential use in developing simple sequence repeats (SSRs), or microsatellites. After bioinformatical mining, a total of 3,018 EST derived SSRs (EST-SSRs) were identified for 2,335 SSR containing ESTs (SSR-ESTs). The frequency of identified SSR-ESTs ranged from 1.5% for Xiphophorus to 7.3% for zebrafish. The dinucleotide repeat motif is the most abundant SSR, accounting for 47%, 52%, 64%, and 78% for medaka, Fundulus, zebrafish, and Xiphophorus, respectively. Simulation analysis suggests that a majority of these EST-SSRs have sufficient flanking sequences for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primer design. Comparative DNA sequence analyses of SSR-ESTs identified several cross-species SSRs and sequences that may be used as cross-reference genes in comparative studies. For example, the flanking sequences of one SSR (CTG)n within the pituitary tumor-transforming gene (PTTG) 1 interacting protein (PTTGIP), showed conservation spanning the medaka, Fundulus, human, and mouse genomes. This study provides a large body of information on EST-SSRs that can be useful for the development of polymorphic markers, gene mapping, and comparative genome analysis. Functional analysis of these SSR-ESTs may reveal their role in metabolism and gene evolution of these model species.     

Application of functional genomic information to develop efficient EST-SSRs for the chicken (Gallus gallus)

Many years of domestication and breeding have given rise to the wide range of chicken breeds that exist today; however, an increasing number of local chicken breeds are under threat of extinction. A comprehensive characterization of chicken markers (especially type I markers) is needed to monitor and conserve genetic diversity in this species. The explosion of genomics and functional genomics information in recent years has opened new possibilities for the generation of molecular markers. We analyzed a large number of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) to test the possibility of using EST-derived microsatellite markers for investigating the Gallus gallus genome. Chromosomal locations for the majority of these SSRs were predicted. Of the 31,576 unigenes assembled from the 544,150 redundant EST sequences, 1757 SSR markers were discovered on 1544 ESTs, using the SSRLocator software, with an average density of 28.7 kb per SSR. The dimer motifs were the most frequent (46.38%), followed by trimeric (38.58%), tetrameric (10.19%), pentameric (4.5%), and hexameric (<1%) markers. Different from the case for cattle and sheep, AT/TA was the most abundant dimeric repeat, accounting for 41.71% of all dimeric repeats in the chicken ESTs. The EST-SSR distribution was not uniform among the chromosomes; the majority of the EST-SSRs were located on chromosomes GGA2 and GGA10. We found that most of the EST-SSRs are involved in positive regulation of cellular and metabolic processes. This is the first time that EST sequences have been mined to find chicken microsatellites. On average, 3.8% of the G. gallus UniGene sequences could be exploited for development of EST-SSRs, indicating a good source for molecular markers as well as for functional genome analysis.     

芦笋EST资源的SSR信息分析

为了在芦笋中开发EST-SSR功能性标记,对来源于NCBI公共数据库的8590条芦笋(AsparagusofficinalisL.)EST序列进行简单重复序列SSR搜索。剔除冗余序列,得到非冗余序列8377条。在非冗余序列中共挖掘出469个EST-SSR,平均相隔14.80kb出现1个SSR。在所有的重复基序中,二核苷酸重复基序的SSR所占比例最高40.51%(190/469),其次是三核苷酸34.97%(164/469),六核苷酸21.11%(99/469)。在所有基序里,CT/AG出现的频率最高有62次,占全部重复基序的13.22%(62/469)。选取含SSR的EST序列30条,并利用primer5软件设计引物,进行SSR位点的扩增,其中27对引物扩增产物,24对有较清晰可靠的目标扩增条带,占引物数的80%,且所检测出的芦笋等位基因数量较丰富,平均4.93个/对。这些EST-SSR标记的开发将有助于芦笋群体遗传多样性、遗传图谱构建、基因定位、分子标记和系谱分析等方面的研究。