Collection and Comparative Analysis of 1888 Full-length cDNAs

A huge amount of cDNA and EST resources have been developed for cultivated rice species Oryza sativa; however, only few cDNA resources are available for wild rice species. In this study, we isolated and com-pletely sequenced 1888 putative full-length cDNA (FLcDNA) clones from wild rice Oryza rufipogon Griff. W1943 for comparative analysis between wild and cultivated rice species. Two cDNA libraries were con-structed from 3-week-old leaf samples under either normal or cold-treated conditions. Homology search-ing of these cDNA sequences revealed that>96.8 % of the wild rice cDNAs were matched to the cultivated rice O. sativa ssp. japonica cv. Nipponbare genome sequence. However, <22 % of them were fully matched to the cv. Nipponbare genome sequence. The comparative analysis showed that O. rufipogon W1943 had greater similarity to O. sativa ssp. japonica than to ssp. indica cultivars. In addition, 17 novel rice cDNAs were identified, and 41 putative tissue-specific expression genes were defined through searching the rice massively parallel signature-sequencing database. In conclusion, these FLcDNA clones are a resource for further function verification and could be broadly utilized in rice biological studies. Key words: wild rice; Oryza rufipogon; full-length cDNA; transcriptome comparison; tissue-specific expression 1