Identification and annotation of abiotic stress responsive candidate genes in peanut ESTs

Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) ranks fifth among the world oil crops and is widely grown in India and neighbouring countries. Due toits large and unknown genome size, studies on genomics and genetic modification of peanut are still scanty as compared to othermodel crops like Arabidopsis, rice, cotton and soybean. Because of its favourable cultivation in semi-arid regions, study on abioticstress responsive genes and its regulation in peanut is very much important. Therefore, we aim to identify and annotate the abioticstress responsive candidate genes in peanut ESTs. Expression data of drought stress responsive corresponding genes and ESTsequences were screened from dot blot experiments shown as heat maps and supplementary tables, respectively as reported byGovind et al. (2009). Some of the screened genes having no information about their ESTs in above mentioned supplementary tableswere retrieved from NCBI. A phylogenetic analysis was performed to find a group of utmost similar ESTs for each selected gene.Individual EST of the said group were further searched in peanut ESTs (1,78,490 whole EST sequences) using stand alone BLAST.For the prediction as well as annotation of abiotic stress responsive selected genes, various tools (like Vec-Screen, Repeat Masker,EST-Trimmer, DNA Baser, WISE2 and I-TASSER) were used. Here we report the predicted result of Contigs, domain as well as 3Dstructure for HSP 17.3KDa protein, DnaJ protein and Type 2 Metallothionein protein.