Characterization of expressed sequence tags generated from skin CDNA clones of Equus Caballus by single pass sequencing

A cDNA library was built using RNA extracted from the skin tissue of an adu lt horse. The library was primed with oligo (dT) and sequences were directi onally inserted in order to produce an expression library. The library has 5.8X 10(5) plaque forming units with 99.6% recombinant phage. The average i nsert size is 1.3 Kbp. Three hundred and thirteen expressed sequence tags ( ESTs) were generated from sequencing of the 5 prime end of randomly selecte d skin cDNA clones. The ESTs were sequenced on an ABI 377 using Big-Dye che mistry. A similarity search was performed on each EST using the NCBI non-re dundant protein database and 206 ESTs were putatively identified. Twenty si x percent of the identified ESTs were redundant. The ESTs were categorized by function. The most frequently identified functional class was translatio nal proteins.