An EST resource for tilapia based on 17 normalized libraries and assembly of 116,899 sequence tags.
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.
Lee
Bo-Young
BY
Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Howe
Aimee E
AE
Conte
Matthew A
MA
D'Cotta
Helena
H
Pepey
Elodie
E
Baroiller
Jean-Francois
JF
di Palma
Federica
F
Carleton
Karen L
KL
Kocher
Thomas D
TD
D000818:Animals; D018076:DNA, Complementary; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D015698:Genomic Library; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; D017210:Tilapia / Q000235:genetics*
D018076:DNA, Complementary