Identification of Floral ESTs from Calamus manan Inflorescence Library

Kalaivani Nadarajah¹*, Leong Shang Jye², Choong Chee Yen² and Wickneswari Ratnam²

¹School of Biosciences and Biotechnology,

²School of Environment and Natural Resources Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia - 436 00 Malaysia.

Corresponding Author E-mail: vani@ukm.my

ABSTRACT: Calamus manan is a rattan species that plays an important role in the furniture industry of Malaysia. To assure the availability of cane supplies, rattan plantations and seed nurseries have been initiated. Sex determination of rattan at a young stage is very important for a successful seed nursery to produce more female trees. Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were generated in order to identify genes found in the inflorescence tissues of C. manan especially floral-related genes that may be used in sex determination. A total of 2304 cDNA clones were partially sequenced from 5’ end to produce 1179 good quality ESTs with an average size of 400 nucleotides. The sequences were analysed using BLASTX and the EST data set had revealed six floral-related genes, i.e. stigma/stylar cysteine-rich adhesin precursor, flower-specific gamma-thionine precursor (defensin), Men-7, FRIGIDA, proline rich anther-specific protein and Early Flowering 5. Calamus manan ESTs that showed a match to floral-related genes were compared with corresponding floral gene sequences from other plants using ClustalW in order to obtain more comprehensive information about sequence similarity. In general, the alignment scores obtained were between 21 to 91% identity. The ESTs that are floral-related genes will be used in developing molecular markers such as CAPS (cleaved amplified polymorphic sequence) that may be used for sex determination in C. manan.

KEYWORDS: Calamus manan; furniture industry; ESTs; flowering genes

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