Affiliations: Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford,
California, USA |
Note: [] Corresponding author: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 260
Panama Street, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA. E-mail: ewing@igs.cnrs-mrs.fr
Abstract: Large numbers of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) have now been
generated from a variety of model organisms. In plants, substantial
collections of ESTs are available for Arabidopsis and rice, in each case
representing significant proportions of the estimated total numbers of
genes. Large-scale comparisons of Arabidopsis and rice sequences are
especially interesting due to the fact that these two species are
representatives of the two subclasses of the flowering plants (Dicotyledonae
and Monocotyledonae, respectively). Here we present the results of
systematic analysis of the Arabidopsis and rice EST
sets. Non-redundant sets of sequences from Arabidopsis and rice were
first separately derived and then combined so that gene families in common
between the two species could be identified. Our results show that
58% of non-singleton ESTs are derived from genes in gene families common to the
two species. These gene families constitute the basis of a core set
of higher plant genes.
