Plant Science 159 (2000) 87–95 Analysis of grape ESTs: global gene expression patterns in leaf and berry Effie Ablett a, *, George Seaton b , Kirsten Scott a , Dale Shelton a , Michael W. Graham c , Peter Baverstock d , L. Slade Lee a , Robert Henry a a Centre for Plant Conseration Genetics, Southern Cross Uniersity, P.O.Box 157, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia b Institute for Cell and Animal Population Biotosy, Ashworth Laborities, King’sBuildings, Edinburgh Uniersity, Edinburgh, EH93JT, UK c Queensland Agricultural Biotechnology Centre, Leel 4, Gehrmann Laboratories, Uniersity of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld 4072, Australia d Graduate Research College, Southern Cross Uniersity, P.O.Box 157, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia Received 9 March 2000; received in revised form 15 May 2000; accepted 3 July 2000 Abstract Analysis of 2479 ESTs from Vitis inifera berry tissue and 2438 from leaf revealed that 1% of the ESTs match to known Vitis proteins, 72% to plant proteins, 11% to non-plant, and 16% had no match (P [N] 0.5). The levels of redundancy were similar in the leaf and berry libraries. Only 12% of the genes matched by the ESTs were common to both libraries indicating marked differences in the genes expressed in the two tissues. The abundance of transcripts with predicted cellular roles in leaf and berry were estimated by classifying the primary BLAST matches to known proteins (score 80) into functional categories. Thirty-six percent of the leaf transcripts were involved in photosynthesis, compared to 3% in the berry. This is a much higher proportion of transcripts involved with a function limited to specialized cells, than was found when transcripts of 33 human tissues were compared using a similar approach, suggesting plant cells may involve their cellular machinery to a greater extent in specialized activities than animal cells. Relatively enhanced expression of specific transcription factors, and genes involved in defense, detoxification, stress response, proteolysis, trafficing, and signal transduction, suggests berry tissue is actively engaged in responding to environmental stimuli. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Expressed sequence tags; Electronic Northern; Vitis inifera ; Gene expression; cDNA www.elsevier.com/locate/plantsci 1. Introduction To date there have been no large-scale EST projects on fruit-bearing woody cultivars, and rel- atively few ESTs are available from woody plant species. With the huge amount of effort that has gone into cereal EST projects, it is surprising that so little attention has been given to woody species. A recent assessment of dbEST listed nearly 245 000 plant ESTs. Most were from cereals, with the only significant listings of woody plant species being 7554 ESTs from loblolly pine, 4809 from poplar, 1251 from citrus and 430 from apple (dbEST release 120399, December 3, 1999). The grape project at the Centre for Plant Conservation Genetics, Lismore, Australia, is producing grape (Vitis inifera ) ESTs from a range of tissues and cultivars to advance gene discovery in woody plant species, particularly in the areas of dor- mancy and budburst, berry development and vine physiology. ESTs were developed in 1991 as a relatively inexpensive and rapid means to identify large numbers of expressed genes [1]. Gene functions are assigned to ESTs based on homology to known proteins from other species. Currently about 50% of ESTs can be identified in this way. With the number of ESTs in dbEST approaching 3.4 mil- lion, other approaches are needed to assign func- tion to the growing numbers of unidentified ESTs. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61-2-66203486; fax: +61-2- 66222080. E-mail address: eablett@scu.edu.au (E. Ablett). 0168-9452/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0168-9452(00)00335-6