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- Title
Insights into corn genes derived from large-scale cDNA sequencing.
- Authors
Nickolai Alexandrov; Vyacheslav Brover; Maxim Troukhan; Tatiana Tatarinova; Hongyu Zhang; Timothy Swaller; John Bouck; Richard Flavell; Kenneth Feldmann
- Abstract
Abstract  We present a large portion of the transcriptome of Zea mays, including ESTs representing 484,032 cDNA clones from 53 libraries and 36,565 fully sequenced cDNA clones, out of which 31,552 clones are non-redundant. These and other previously sequenced transcripts have been aligned with available genome sequences and have provided new insights into the characteristics of gene structures and promoters within this major crop species. We found that although the average number of introns per gene is about the same in corn and Arabidopsis, corn genes have more alternatively spliced isoforms. Examination of the nucleotide composition of coding regions reveals that corn genes, as well as genes of other Poaceae (Grass family), can be divided into two classes according to the GC content at the third position in the amino acid encoding codons. Many of the transcripts that have lower GC content at the third position have dicot homologs but the high GC content transcripts tend to be more specific to the grasses. The high GC content class is also enriched with intronless genes. Together this suggests that an identifiable class of genes in plants is associated with the Poaceae divergence. Furthermore, because many of these genes appear to be derived from ancestral genes that do not contain introns, this evolutionary divergence may be the result of horizontal gene transfer from species not only with different codon usage but possibly that did not have introns, perhaps outside of the plant kingdom. By comparing the cDNAs described herein with the non-redundant set of corn mRNAs in GenBank, we estimate that there are about 50,000 different protein coding genes in Zea. All of the sequence data from this study have been submitted to DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL under accession numbers EU940701âEU977132 (FLI cDNA) and FK944382-FL482108 (EST).
- Subjects
CORN genetics; ANTISENSE DNA; NUCLEOTIDE sequence; MESSENGER RNA; MOLECULAR cloning; ARABIDOPSIS
- Publication
Plant Molecular Biology, 2009, Vol 69, Issue 1-2, p179
- ISSN
0167-4412
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11103-008-9415-4