'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 LARGE SCALE ANALYSIS OF ESTS IN COMMON WHEAT Y. OGIHARA, Y. NEMOTO, K. MURAI, Y. YAMAZAKI, T. SHIN-I, Y. KOHARA Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Yokohama City University, Yokohama 244-0813, Japan

In order to develop functional genomics of wheat we carried out a large-scale analysis of ESTs in common wheat.  Total RNAs were extracted from ten wheat tissues typically in the wheat life cycle i.e. 14 days old seedlings and roots, spikelets at early flowering and flower differentiation stage, spikes at meiosis, heading date and flowering date, ovary at flowering date and seeds 10 and 30 days after pollination.  The cDNA libraries were constructed from these RNAs and randomly sequenced from both 5' and 3' ends.  At present 98,635 clone sequences were accumulated, about half of which were independent clones.  Characteristic features of wheat ESTs will be discussed.