No abstract

This study assessed the abundance of microsatellites, or simple sequence repeats (SSR), in 19 Eucalyptus EST libraries from FORESTs, containing cDNA sequences from five species: E. grandis, E. globulus, E. saligna, E. urophylla and E. camaldulensis. Overall, a total of 11,534 SSRs and 8,447 SSR-containing sequences (25.5% of total ESTs) were identified, with an average of 1 SSR/2.5 kb when considering all motifs and 1 SSR/3.1 kb when mononucleotides were not included. Dimeric repeats were the most abundant (41.03%), followed by trimerics (36.11%) and monomerics (19.59%). The most frequent motifs were A/T (87.24%) for monomerics, AG/CT (94.44%) for dimerics, CCG/CGG (37.87%) for trimerics, AAGG/CCTT (18.75%) for tetramerics, AGAGG/CCTCT (14.04%) for pentamerics and ACGGCG/CGCCGT (6.30%) for hexamerics. According to sequence length, Class II or potentially variable markers were the most commonly found, followed by Class III. Two sequences presented high similarity to previously published Eucalyptus sequences from the NCBI database, EMBRA_72 and EMBRA_122. Local blastn search for transposons did not reveal the presence of any transposable elements with a cut-off value of 10 -50 . The large number of microsatellites identified will contribute to the refinement of marker-assisted mapping and to the discovery of novel markers for virtually all genes of economic interest.

Pleiotropic drug resistance (PDR) proteins, a subfamily of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters, have been recently shown to play a role in plant defense against biotic and abiotic stresses. However, nothing is known about their expression in citrus. To investigate the occurrence of PDR homologues in citrus species, we have surveyed EST sequences from different tissues and conditions of the Citrus Expressed Sequence Tags (CitEST) database, through sequence similarity search analyses and inspections for characteristic PDR domains. Multiple sequence alignments, prediction of transmembrane topology and phylogenetic analysis of PDR-like proteins were additionally performed. This study allowed the identification of nine putative proteins showing characteristic PDR features in citrus species under various conditions, which may indicate a potential correlation between PDRs and stress and metabolism of citrus plants. Moreover, a tissue-specific putative PDR-like protein was found in sweet orange fruits. To our knowledge, this is the first report regarding the identification of citrus ESTs encoding PDR-like proteins as well as the first to identify a putative full ABC transporter with specific expression in fruits.