ESTWeb: bioinformatics services for EST sequencing projects

ESTWeb is an internet based software package designed for uniform data processing and storage for large-scale EST sequencing projects. The package provides for: (a) reception of sequencing chromatograms; (b) sequence processing such as base-calling, vector screening, comparison with public databases; (c) storage of data and analysis in a relational database, (d) generation of a graphical report of individual sequence quality; and (e) issuing of reports with statistics of productivity and redundancy. The software facilitates real-time monitoring and evaluation of EST sequence acquisition progress along an EST sequencing project.     

Mapping microsatellite markers identified in porcine EST sequences

A sequence search of swine expressed sequence tags (EST) data in GenBank identified over 100 sequence files which contained a microsatellite repeat or simple sequence repeat (SSR). Most of these repeat motifs were dinucleotide (CA/GT) repeats; however, a number of tri-, tetra-, penta- and hexa-nucleotide repeats were also detected. An initial assessment of six dinucleotide and 14 higher-order repeat markers indicated that only dinucleotide markers yielded a sufficient number of informative markers (100% vs. 14% for dinucleotide and higher order repeats, respectively). Primers were designed for an additional 50 di- and one tri-nucleotide SSRs. Overall, 42 markers were polymorphic in the US Meat Animal Research Center (MARC) reference population, 17 markers were uninformative and 12 primer pairs failed to satisfactorily amplify genomic DNA. A comparison of di-nucleotide repeat vs. markers with repeat motifs of three to six bases demonstrated that 72% of dinucleotide markers were informative relative to only 7% of other repeat motifs. The difference was the result of a much higher percentage of monomorphic markers in the three to six base repeat motif markers than in the dinucleotide markers (64% vs. 14%). Either higher order repeat motifs are less polymorphic in the porcine genome or our selection criteria for repeat length of more than 17 contiguous bases was too low. The mapped microsatellite markers add to the porcine genetic map and provide valuable links between the porcine and human genome.     

Arabidopsis genomic information for interpreting wheat EST sequences

The resources available from Arabidopsis thaliana for interpreting functional attributes of wheat EST are reviewed. A focus for the review is a comparison between wheat EST sequences, generated from developing endosperm tissue, and the complete genomic sequence from Arabidopsis. The available information indicates that not only can tentative annotations be assigned to many wheat genes but also putative or unknown Arabidopsis gene annotations can be improved by comparative genomics. Electronic Publication     

利用EST序列构建Mascot本地数据库

对蛋白质质谱数据进行数据库比对和鉴定是蛋白质组学研究技术中的一个重要步骤。由于公共数据库蛋白质数据信息不全,有些蛋白质质谱数据无法得到有效的鉴定。而利用相关物种的EST序列构建专门的质谱数据库则可以增加鉴定未知蛋白的几率。本文介绍了利用EST序列构建Mascot本地数据库的具体方法和步骤,扩展了Mascot检索引擎对蛋白质质谱数据的鉴定范围,从数据库层面提高了对未知蛋白的鉴别几率,为蛋白质组学研究提供了一种较为实用的生物信息学分析技术。     

Rapid cloning and bioinformatic analysis of spinach Y chromosome-specific EST sequences

The genome of spinach single chromosome complement is about 1000 Mbp, which is the model material to study the molecular mechanisms of plant sex differentiation. The cytological study showed that the biggest spinach chromosome (chromosome 1) was taken as spinach sex chromosome. It had three alleles of sex-related X, X ^m and Y. Many researchers have been trying to clone the sex-determining genes and investigated the molecular mechanism of spinach sex differentiation. However, there are no successful cloned reports about these genes. A new technology combining chromosome microdissection with hybridization-specific amplification (HSA) was adopted. The spinach Y chromosome degenerate oligonucleotide primed-PCR (DOP-PCR) products were hybridized with cDNA of the male spinach flowers in florescence. The female spinach genome was taken as blocker and cDNA library specifically expressed in Y chromosome was constructed. Moreover, expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences in cDNA library were cloned, sequenced and bioinformatics was analysed. There were 63 valid EST sequences obtained in this study. The fragment size was between 53 and 486 bp. BLASTn homologous alignment indicated that 12 EST sequences had homologous sequences of nucleic acids, the rest were new sequences. BLASTx homologous alignment indicated that 16 EST sequences had homologous protein-encoding nucleic acid sequence. The spinach Y chromosome-specific EST sequences laid the foundation for cloning the functional genes, specifically expressed in spinach Y chromosome. Meanwhile, the establishment of the technology system in the research provided a reference for rapid cloning of other biological sex chromosome-specific EST sequences.     

GoSh: a web-based database for goat and sheep EST sequences

The GoSh database is a collection of 58 990 Capra hircus and Ovis aries expressed sequence tags. A perl pipeline was prepared to process sequences, and data were collected in a MySQL database. A PHP-based web interface allows browsing and querying the database. Putative single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection, as well as search to repeats were performed, and links to external related resources were provided. Sequences were annotated against three different databases and an algorithm was implemented to create statistics of the distribution of retrieved homologous ontologies in the Gene Ontology categories. The GoSh database is a repository of data and links related to goat and sheep expressed genes. AVAILABILITY: The GoSh database is available at http://www.itb.cnr.it/gosh/     

GarlicESTdb: an online database and mining tool for garlic EST sequences

Background  

Allium sativum., commonly known as garlic, is a species in the onion genus (Allium), which is a large and diverse one containing over 1,250 species. Its close relatives include chives, onion, leek and shallot. Garlic has been used throughout recorded history for culinary, medicinal use and health benefits. Currently, the interest in garlic is highly increasing due to nutritional and pharmaceutical value including high blood pressure and cholesterol, atherosclerosis and cancer. For all that, there are no comprehensive databases available for Expressed Sequence Tags(EST) of garlic for gene discovery and future efforts of genome annotation. That is why we developed a new garlic database and applications to enable comprehensive analysis of garlic gene expression.     

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。     

GMAP: a genomic mapping and alignment program for mRNA and EST sequences

MOTIVATION: We introduce GMAP, a standalone program for mapping and aligning cDNA sequences to a genome. The program maps and aligns a single sequence with minimal startup time and memory requirements, and provides fast batch processing of large sequence sets. The program generates accurate gene structures, even in the presence of substantial polymorphisms and sequence errors, without using probabilistic splice site models. Methodology underlying the program includes a minimal sampling strategy for genomic mapping, oligomer chaining for approximate alignment, sandwich DP for splice site detection, and microexon identification with statistical significance testing. RESULTS: On a set of human messenger RNAs with random mutations at a 1 and 3% rate, GMAP identified all splice sites accurately in over 99.3% of the sequences, which was one-tenth the error rate of existing programs. On a large set of human expressed sequence tags, GMAP provided higher-quality alignments more often than blat did. On a set of Arabidopsis cDNAs, GMAP performed comparably with GeneSeqer. In these experiments, GMAP demonstrated a several-fold increase in speed over existing programs. AVAILABILITY: Source code for gmap and associated programs is available at http://www.gene.com/share/gmap SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: http://www.gene.com/share/gmap.     

Use of bovine EST data and human genomic sequences to map 100 gene-specific bovine markers

A system to use bovine EST data in conjunction with human genomic sequence to improve the bovine linkage map over the entire genome or on specific chromosomes was evaluated. Bovine EST sequence was used to provide primer sequences corresponding to bovine genes, while human genomic sequence directed primer design to flank introns and produce amplicons of appropriate size for efficient direct sequencing. The sequence tagged sites (STS) produced in this way from the four sires of the MARC reference families were examined for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that could be used to map the corresponding genes. With this approach, along with a primer/extension mass spectrometry SNP genotyping assay, 100 ESTs were placed on the bovine genetic linkage map. The first 70 were chosen at random from bovine EST–human genomic comparisons. An additional 30 ESTs were successfully mapped to bovine Chromosome 19 (BTA19), and comparison of the resulting BTA19 map to the position of the corresponding human orthologs on the HSA17 draft sequences revealed differences in the spacing and order of genes. Over 80% of successful amplicons contained SNPs, indicating that this is an efficient approach to generating EST-associated genetic markers. We have demonstrated the feasibility of constructing a linkage map based on SNPs associated with ESTs and the plausibility of utilizing EST, comparative mapping information, and human sequence data to target regions of the bovine genome for SNP marker development.     

Genomic differentiation of Hordeum chilense from H. vulgare as revealed by repetitive and EST sequences

Hordeum vulgare, cultivated barley, and its wild relative, H. chilense, have several important traits that might be useful for wheat improvement. Here, in situ hybridization and barley expressed sequence tag (EST) markers were used to characterize and compare the chromosomes of H. chilense with those of H. vulgare. FISH with four repetitive DNA sequences, AG, AAG, 5S rDNA and 45S rDNA, was applied to the mitotic chromosomes of H. vulgare, H. chilense and available wheat-H. chilense addition and substitution lines. FISH with the AAG repeat differentiated the individual chromosomes of H. chilense and H. vulgare. The patterns of FISH signals in the two species differed greatly. The 45S rDNA signals were observed on two pairs of chromosomes in both species, while the 5S rDNA signals were observed on four pairs of chromosomes in H. vulgare and on one pair in H. chilense. The AG repeat showed FISH signals at the centromeric regions of all chromosomes of H. vulgare but none of the chromosomes of H. chilense. These results indicate that the chromosomes of the two species are highly differentiated. To study the homoeology between the two species, 209 EST markers of H. vulgare were allocated to individual chromosomes of H. chilense. One hundred and forty of the EST markers were allocated to respective chromosomes of H. chilense using the wheat-H. chilense addition and substitution lines. Twenty-six EST markers on average were allocated to each chromosome except to the chromosome 2H(ch)S, to which only 10 markers were allocated. Ninety percent of the allocated EST markers in H. chilense were placed on H. vulgare chromosomes of the same homo-eologous group, indicating that the expressed sequences of the two species were highly conserved. These EST markers would be useful for detecting chromatin introgressed from these species into the wheat genome.     

Partial deletion of human alpha-galactosidase A gene in Fabry disease: direct repeat sequences as a possible cause of slipped mispairing

A partial deletion involving exon 3 associated with a single base change (A to C) was found in the alpha-galactosidase A gene of a hemizygous male Fabry patient and his mother, a heterozygous proband. This 402-bp deletion was flanked by 6-bp direct repeat sequences, and the intervening portion was found to have unique complementary sequences. These specific structures may have promoted "slipped mispairing" in this family.