Sequencing of cDNA Clones and Analysis of the Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) Properties of Young Tea Plant (Camellia sinensis) Shoots

The construction of two cDNA libraries of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis cv. Longjing 43 and Anji Baicha), the se-quencing of Longjing 43 cDNA clones and the analysis of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were reported. Totally, 4 320 clones from the cDNA library of Longjing 43 were sequenced, and 2 963 useful sequences were obtained, corresponding to 68.5%. Four hundred and sixteen clones shorter than 150 bp and 863 repeated clones were excluded, the first 1 684 valid tea plant ESTs were generated. Most of the ESTs were between 300--700 bp, with an average of 478 bp. Six hundred and seven ESTs with known or putative function were identified by BlastN searches against the NCBI non-redundant nucleotide databases, corresponding to more than 130 functional genes in the tea plant. The rest, 1 077 ESTs, were novel gene partial or full sequences. The results indicated that ESTs sequencing was a high, rapid and effective approach to identify novel functional genes for tea plant.