Construction of a Full-length cDNA Library from Korean Stewartia (Stewartia koreana Nakai) and Characterization of EST Dataset

In this study, we report the generation and analysis of 1,392 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from Korean Stewartia (Stewartia koreana Nakai). A cDNA library was generated from the young leaf tissue and a total of 1,392 cDNA were partially sequenced. EST and unigene sequence quality were determined by computational filtering, manual review, and BLAST analyses. Finally, 1,301 ESTs were acquired after the removal of the vector sequence and filtering over a minimum length 100 nucleotides. A total of 893 unigene, consisting of 150 contigs and 743 singletons, was identified after assembling. Also, we identified 95 new microsatellite-containing sequences from the unigenes and classified the structure according to their repeat unit. According to homology search with BLASTX against the NCBI database, 65% of ESTs were homologous with known function and 11.6% of ESTs were matched with putative or unknown function. The remaining 23.2% of ESTs showed no significant similarity to any protein sequences found in the public database. Annotation based searches against multiple databases including wine grape and populus sequences helped to identify putative functions of ESTs and unigenes. Gene ontology (GO) classification showed that the most abundant GO terms were transport, nucleotide binding, plastid, in terms biological process, molecular function and cellular component, respectively. The sequence data will be used to characterize potential roles of new genes in Stewartia and provided for the useful tools as a genetic resource.