Data Mining of ESTs for Genetic Improvement of Salt Tolerance in Wheat

A total of 4,131 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were selected from wheat EST database (http://wheat.pw.usda.gov/cgi-bin/westsql/est_lib.cgi.) to identify genic regions differing at structural and functional level between durum wheat (tetraploid genome, AABB) and bread wheat (hexaploid genome, AABBDD) cultivars in response to salt stress. Selected ESTs from salt stressed Triticum aestivum cDNA libraries (922 seedling, 2055 root, 1154 sheat ESTs) were used for construction of contig tags. Using contigs assembled (136 seedling, 268 root, 152 sheat) sense and antisense primers were designed to investigate the sequence and expressional differences in bread and durum wheat cultivars. The genetic information obtained from data mining of ESTs can make huge contribution to the characterization of genes in response to salinity stress, and is strongly expected to aid our understanding of the molecular mechanism of salinity stress tolerance of durum and bread wheat in particular.