An EST resource for tilapia based on 17 normalized libraries and assembly of 116,899 sequence tags

• Published in: BMC Plant Biology Vol. 11; no. 278
• Main Authors: Lee B.Y, Howe A.E, Conte M.A, D'Cotta H, Pepey E, Baroiller J.F, Di Palma F, Carleton K.L, Kocher T.D
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: TILAPIA (GENRE)

Background: Large collections of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are a fundamental resource for analysis of gene expression and annotation of genome sequences. We generated 116,899 ESTs from 17 normalized and two non-normalized cDNA libraries representing 16 tissues from tilapia, a cichlid fish widely used in aquaculture and biological research. Results: The ESTs were assembled into 20,190 contigs and 36,028 singletons for a total of 56,218 unique sequences and a total assembled length of 35,168,415 bp. Over the whole project, a unique sequence was discovered for every 2.079 sequence reads. 17,722 (31.5%) of these unique sequences had significant BLAST hits (e-value < 10-10) to the UniProt database. Conclusion: Normalization of the cDNA pools with double-stranded nuclease allowed us to efficiently sequence a large collection of ESTs. These sequences are an important resource for studies of gene expression, comparative mapping and annotation of the forthcoming tilapia genome sequence. (Résumé d'auteur)