Accumulation of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) is an alternative approach to collecting DNA sequence information. A project for sequencing the tomato genome was launched by The International Solanaceae Project (SOL) in the year 2003, and the project is currently in the final stage of sequence polishing (March, 2010). Whole-genome sequencing is one of the approaches to achieve this goal. To understand the physiological processes of tomato at the molecular level, it is necessary to link traits to DNA sequence. A number of studies have accumulated substantial information regarding the genetics and physiology of tomato. Tomato ( Solanum lycopersicum) is a member of the Solanaceae, and it has served as a model system for fruit development and plant defense.

This taxon includes a number of vegetable crops including fruit-bearing vegetables, tuber-bearing vegetables, and ornamental plants, many of which have economic importance. The Solanaceae family comprises 1000-2000 species that show wide morphological variability and ecological adaptability. According to a comparison of exon sequences between the nrFLcDNAs and the tomato genome sequences, the frequency of nucleotide mismatch in exons between Micro-Tom and the genome-sequencing cultivar (Heinz 1706) was estimated to be 0.061%. Introns of tomato genes were longer than those of Arabidopsis and rice. Mapping of the nrFLcDNAs onto currently available tomato genome sequences facilitated prediction of exon-intron structure. A comparison of nrFLcDNAs with genes of sixteen plants facilitated the identification of tomato genes that are not found in other plants, most of which did not have known protein domains.

Classification of functions of proteins predicted from the coding sequences demonstrated that nrFLcDNAs covered a broad range of functions. Analysis of untranslated regions demonstrated that tomato has longer 5'- and 3'-untranslated regions than most other plants but rice. By checking redundant sequences, coding sequences, and chimeric sequences, a set of 11,502 non-redundant full-length cDNAs (nrFLcDNAs) was generated. Koh Aoki: Kentaro Yano: Ayako Suzuki: Shingo Kawamura: Nozomu Sakurai: Kunihiro Suda: Atsushi Kurabayashi: Tatsuya Suzuki: Taneaki Tsugane: Manabu Watanabe: Kazuhide Ooga: Maiko Torii: Takanori Narita: Tadasu Shin-i: Yuji Kohara: Naoki Yamamoto: Hideki Takahashi: Yuichiro Watanabe: Mayumi Egusa: Motoichiro Kodama: Yuki Ichinose: Mari Kikuchi: Sumire Fukushima: Akiko Okabe: Tsutomu Arie: Yuko Sato: Katsumi Yazawa: Shinobu Satoh: Toshikazu Omura: Hiroshi Ezura: Daisuke Shibata: accelerate the progress in tomato genomics, we developed a collection of fully-sequenced 13,227 Micro-Tom full-length cDNAs.

Tatsuya suda