THE ARABIDOPSIS-THALIANA CDNA SEQUENCING PROJECTS

Nearly 30 000 Arabidopsis thaliana EST (Expressed Sequence Tags) have been produced by a French-American consortium. Despite redundancy, the se sequences tag about half of the expected Arabidopsis genes. Approxi mately 40% of the non-redundant EST can be assigned a putative functio n by simple homology search. This programme allowed the identification of a large number of genes which mould have been very difficult to is olate by other classical techniques. It considerably stimulated many a reas of plant biology by the rapid discovery a large number of genes, by revealing multigene families and by allowing the analysis of differ ential expression of the different members. Finally this programme fac ilitated construction of physical maps of the chromosomes and opened t he way for complete sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome and comparati ve mapping of the major plant crops. (C) 1997 Federation of European B iochemical Societies.