title: An EST resource for tilapia based on 17 normalized libraries and assembly of 116,899 sequence tags.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Large collections of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are a fundamental resource for analysis of gene expression and annotation of genome sequences. We generated 116,899 ESTs from 17 normalized and two non-normalized cDNA libraries representing 16 tissues from tilapia, a cichlid fish widely used in aquaculture and biological research.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The ESTs were assembled into 20,190 contigs and 36,028 singletons for a total of 56,218 unique sequences and a total assembled length of 35,168,415 bp. Over the whole project, a unique sequence was discovered for every 2.079 sequence reads. 17,722 (31.5%) of these unique sequences had significant BLAST hits (e-value < 10(-10)) to the UniProt database.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Normalization of the cDNA pools with double-stranded nuclease allowed us to efficiently sequence a large collection of ESTs. These sequences are an important resource for studies of gene expression, comparative mapping and annotation of the forthcoming tilapia genome sequence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Bo-Young
authors.initials: BY
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Aimee E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Howe
authors.forename: Matthew A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Conte
authors.forename: Helena
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: D'Cotta
authors.forename: Elodie
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pepey
authors.forename: Jean-Francois
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Baroiller
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: di Palma
authors.forename: Karen L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Carleton
authors.forename: Thomas D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Kocher
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D018076:DNA, Complementary; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D015698:Genomic Library; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; D017210:Tilapia / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D018076:DNA, Complementary