Laudencia-Chingcuanco Debbie L, Stamova Boryana S, Lazo Gerard R, Cui Xiangqin, Anderson Olin D
Western Regional Research Center, USDA-ARS Buchanan Street, Albany, CA 94710, USA.
J Appl Genet. 2006;47(4):287-302. doi: 10.1007/BF03194638.
Among the cereals, wheat is the most widely grown geographically and is part of the staple diet in much of the world. Understanding how the cereal endosperm develops and functions will help generate better tools to manipulate grain qualities important to end-users. We used a genomics approach to identify and characterize genes that are expressed in the wheat endosperm. We analyzed the 17,949 publicly available wheat endosperm EST sequences to identify genes involved in the biological processes that occur within this tissue. Clustering and assembly of the ESTs resulted in the identification of 6,187 tentative unique genes, 2,358 of which formed contigs and 3,829 remained as singletons. A BLAST similarity search against the NCBI non-redundant sequence database revealed abundant messages for storage proteins, putative defense proteins, and proteins involved in starch and sucrose metabolism. The level of abundance of the putatively identified genes reflects the physiology of the developing endosperm. Half of the identified genes have unknown functions. Approximately 61% of the endosperm ESTs has been tentatively mapped in the hexaploid wheat genome. Using microarrays for global RNA profiling, we identified endosperm genes that are specifically up regulated in the developing grain.
在谷类作物中，小麦在地理上种植最为广泛，并且是世界上大部分地区主食的一部分。了解谷类胚乳如何发育和发挥功能将有助于开发更好的工具来操控对终端用户很重要的谷物品质。我们采用基因组学方法来鉴定和表征在小麦胚乳中表达的基因。我们分析了17949条公开可用的小麦胚乳EST序列，以鉴定参与该组织内发生的生物学过程的基因。对EST进行聚类和组装后，鉴定出6187个暂定的独特基因，其中2358个形成重叠群，3829个仍为单拷贝。针对NCBI非冗余序列数据库进行的BLAST相似性搜索揭示了大量与贮藏蛋白、假定的防御蛋白以及参与淀粉和蔗糖代谢的蛋白相关的信息。推测鉴定出的基因的丰度水平反映了发育中胚乳的生理状况。已鉴定出的基因中有一半功能未知。大约61%的胚乳EST已在六倍体小麦基因组中初步定位。利用微阵列进行全局RNA谱分析，我们鉴定出了在发育中的籽粒中特异性上调的胚乳基因。
