Comparative Analysis and EST Mining Reveals High Degree of Conservation among FiveBrassicaceaeSpecies

Abstract

Brassicaceaeis an important family of the plant kingdom which includes several plants of major economic importance. TheBrassica spp.andArabidopsisshare much-conserved colinearity between their genomes which can be exploited for the genomic research inBrassicaceaecrops. In this study, 131,286 ESTs of fiveBrassicaceaespecies were assembled into unigene contigs and compared withArabidopsisgene indices. Almost all the unigenes ofBrassicaceaespecies showed high similarities withArabidopsisgenes except those ofB. napus,where 90% of unigenes were found similar. A total of 9,699 SSRs were identified in the unigenes. PCR primers were designed based on this information and amplified across species for validation. Functional annotation of unigenes showed that the majority of the genes are present in metabolism and energy functional classes. It is expected that comparative genome analysis betweenArabidopsisand related crop species will expedite research in the more complexBrassicagenomes. This would be helpful for genomics as well as evolutionary studies, and DNA markers developed can be used for mapping, tagging, and cloning of important genes inBrassicaceae.