BODE, H; STEELE, R; BLUMBERG, B; PANG, J; GEE, L; WIGGE, P; CLIFTON, S; PAPE, D; Univ. of California, Irvine; Univ. of California, Irvine; Univ. of California, Irvine; Univ. of California, Irvine; Univ. of California, Irvine; Salk Institute, San Diego; Washington Univ., St. Louis; Washington Univ., St. Louis: A Hydra EST project

Knowledge of the gene set of a hydra is valuable for at least two reasons. It would provide important information for the evolution of the metazoan gene set. And, more practically, the availability of the genes of this set would lead to more rapid progress in understanding the molecular basis of a number of biological processes in hydra as well as evolutionary aspects of these processes. To this end, an EST project has been initiated in collaboration with the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington Univ. in St. Louis. This project in combination with a similar one underway at the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima should lead to the identification of many, if not most, of the genes of hydra. cDNA libraries have been constructed from mRNA isolated from whole budding animals of the 105 strain of H. magnipapillata. Other libraries will be constructed from the mRNA of regenerating heads and embryos. In addition, DNA array procedures will be carried out to enrich one or more of these cDNA libraries for rarely expressed genes. So far ~2600 different genes have been identified. Of these ~43% are homologues of known genes, 16% are related to hypothetical proteins identified in other organisms, and 41% are novel sequences. The sequence information is available in GenBank, and has been organized on a website [http://hydra.ics.uci.edu/blast/jf/]. As new sequences are obtained they will be submitted to GenBank and will be added to the website. The website will be modified to make it easier to deal with the increasing amount of data.