Bioinformatics analyses of expressed sequence tags in Chinese spring wheat spikes under salt stress

Functional genomics7T 7Thelps7T 7Tto7T 7Tunderstand the7T 7Tkey7T 7Tmechanisms involved in7T 7Tsalt stress7T 7Ttolerance7T and 7Tallows the possibility of7T 7Ttargeted7T 7Tgenetic7T 7Tmanipulation7T 7Tto improve7T 7Tcrop tolerance to7T 7Tsalinity7T. The goal of this study was to identify new genes related to salt stress and functional analysis based on expressed sequence tags (EST). Therefore, two EST libraries under control and salt stressed conditions were downloaded from Harvard and Graingenes databanks. EGassembler, NCBI BLAST, MaxPlanck and IDEG6 software tools were applied for clustering and assembling EST sequences, determination of proteins related to unigenes (contigs and singletons), functional categories and statistics test, respectively. Results showed that twenty functional categories are significantly different between control and stress conditions. Most of contigs and singletons fell into protein and RNA categories whereas CHO metabolism and TCA and organic transformation had the minimum of numbers of contigs and singletons in both control and salt stressed conditions. Percentage of unigenes in mitochondrial electron transport/ATP synthesis, Lipid metabolism, redox, protein, RNA, DNA, and cell categories were significantly higher in stress condition compared with control condition. Therefore, these functional categories 7Tcould be involved in7T 7Tthe mechanism of7T 7Tresponse7T 7Tto salt stress. 7TTwo hundred and seventy-one genes were differentially expressed that grouped into 23 functional categories. The wheat genes identified in this study can be considered as candidates genes to improve salt tolerance through genetic manipulation.