Meeting Abstract

LBS4.1  Sunday, Jan. 6  The porcelain crab EST sequencing project STILLMAN, J.*; TAGMOUNT, A.; LINDQUIST, E.; WANG, M; San Francisco State Univ.; San Francisco State Univ.; Joint Genome Institute; Joint Genome Institute stillmaj@sfsu.edu

The porcelain crab genus Petrolisthes is speciose (>100 species), with individual species distribution patterns across a wide range of ecological gradients. Physiologically, these crabs have a great diversity of phenotypes with patterns of adaptation to environmental variables including temperature and aerial exposure. Current research goals are to use genomic approaches to understand the mechanistic bases of the physiological adaptations these crabs have made as well as to study physiological variation of animal across ecological gradients in nature. To accomplish these goals we have embarked on a significant EST sequencing project as part of the Joint Genome Institute 2006 Community Sequencing Program. In total, n=61,440 cloned cDNAs from both normalized and non-normalized libraries were sequenced, resulting in a total of over n=120,000 ESTs. Clustering of these ESTs resulted in a total of over unique 39,000 consensus sequences, which are represented in 18,625 cloned cDNAs. This number of unique cDNAs is similar to that found in the Daphnia pulex genome sequencing project cDNA libraries of over n=200,000 cloned cDNAs. Thus, we feel confident that we have captured as much of the porcelain crab transcriptome as is possible without a genome sequence. Homology searches of unique consensus sequences against databases including GenBank, SwissProt, PFAM, and Gene Ontology are underway, and a summary of those searches will be presented. We are also presently working to make these data publicly available at the Porcelain Crab Array Database (PCAD) at http://array.sfsu.edu, and they will be uploaded to GenBank. This work was supported by NSF-IOB 0533920 to JHS and the DOE JGI 2006 CSP.