Development and annotation of perennial Triticeae ESTs and SSR markers

Triticeae contains hundreds of species of both annual and perennial types. Although substantial genomic tools are available for annual Triticeae cereals such as wheat and barley, the perennial Triticeae lack sufficient genomic resources for genetic mapping or diversity research. To increase the amount of sequence information available in the perennial Triticeae, three expressed sequence tag (EST) libraries were developed and annotated for Pseudoroegneria spicata, a mixture of both Elymus wawawaiensis and E. lanceolatus, and a Leymus cinereus x L. triticoides interspecific hybrid. The ESTs were combined into unigene sets of 8780 unigenes for P. spicata, 11281 unigenes for Leymus, and 7212 unigenes for Elymus. Unigenes were annotated based on putative orthology to genes from rice, wheat, barley, other Poaceae, Arabidopsis, and the non-redundant database of the NCBI. Simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were developed, tested for amplification and polymorphism, and aligned to the rice genome. Leymus EST markers homologous to rice chromosome 2 genes were syntenous on Leymus homeologous groups 6a and 6b (previously 1b), demonstrating promise for in silico comparative mapping. All ESTs and SSR markers are available on an EST information management and annotation database (http://titan.biotec.uiuc.edu/triticeae/).