Gene identification and expression analysis of 86,136 Expressed Sequence Tags (EST) from the rice genome.

Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) analysis has pioneered genome-wide gene discovery and expression profiling. In order to establish a gene expression index in the rice cultivar indica, we sequenced and analyzed 86,136 ESTs from nine rice cDNA libraries from the super hybrid cultivar LYP9 and its parental cultivars. We assembled these ESTs into 13,232 contigs and leave 8,976 singletons.

Compositional gradients in Gramineae genes.

In this study, we describe a property of Gramineae genes, and perhaps all monocot genes, that is not observed in eudicot genes. Along the direction of transcription, beginning at the junction of the 5'-UTR and the coding region, there are gradients in GC content, codon usage, and amino-acid usage. The magnitudes of these gradients are large enough to hinder the annotation of the rice genome and to confound the detection of protein homologies across the monocot-eudicot divide.

RePS: a sequence assembler that masks exact repeats identified from the shotgun data.

We describe a sequence assembler, RePS (repeat-masked Phrap with scaffolding), that explicitly identifies exact 20mer repeats from the shotgun data and removes them prior to the assembly. The established software is used to compute meaningful error probabilities for each base. Clone-end-pairing information is used to construct scaffolds that order and orient the contigs.