Title

A database of annotated tentative orthologs from crop abiotic stress transcripts

Authors

Jayashree Balaji^1* ,Jonathan H Crouch², Prasad VNS Petite¹,David A Hoisington³

Affiliation

¹ Bioinformatics Unit, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Patancheru 502 324, Andhra Pradesh, India;²International Wheat and Maize Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), Apdo. Postal 6-641, 06600 México, D.F., México; ³Applied Genomics Laboratory,

Email

b.jayashree@CGIAR.ORG; * Corresponding author

Article Type

Web Database

Date

received September 28, 2006; accepted October 03, 2006; published online October 07, 2006

Abstract

A minimal requirement to initiate a comparative genomics study on plant responses to abiotic stresses is a dataset of orthologous sequences. The availability of a large amount of sequence information, including those derived from stress cDNA libraries allow for the identification of stress related genes and orthologs associated with the stress response. Orthologous sequences serve as tools to explore genes and their relationships across species. For this purpose, ESTs from stress cDNA libraries across 16 crop species including 6 important cereal crops and 10 dicots were systematically collated and subjected to bioinformatics analysis such as clustering, grouping of tentative orthologous sets, identification of protein motifs/patterns in the predicted protein sequence, and annotation with stress conditions, tissue/library source and putative function. All data are available to the scientific community at http://intranet.icrisat.org/gt1/tog/homepage.htm. We believe that the availability of annotated plant abiotic stress ortholog sets will be a valuable resource for researchers studying the biology of environmental stresses in plant systems, molecular evolution and genomics.

Keywords          

   database; orthologs; comparative genomics; abiotic stress transcripts

Citation

Balaji et al., Bioinformation 1(6): 225-227 (2006)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.