Transcriptome of Lolium/Schedonorus/Festuca Species.

Molecular tools for forage grasses are presently sparse.  In order to make available these tools for the community, a large scale sequencing effort has been conducted. Roughly 140,000 cDNA clones from normalized libraries obtained from meadow fescue/Epichloe festucae inflorescences and stromata and tall fescue root RNA have been sequenced.  To date 128,189 EST sequences have been submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information database, making this resource available to the community.  Assembly of the non- Epichloe cDNAs resulted in 42,003 unigenes, or unique genes.  These will serve as the basis for plant genomic analysis and further molecular tool development in forage grasses.  The assembly was used to anchor sequencing done on using the Next Generation Illumina (RNA-Seq) sequencing technology comparing expression in pseudostems of clones of tall fescue infected with Neotyphodium coenophialum (E+) with pseudostems of non-infected clones (E-).  Of the 12 million Illumina reads approximately 60% of the reads matched 32,588 plant unigenes.  Comparison of the expression between the E+ and E- clones found that 125 unigenes were differentially expressed two-fold or more.  The Illumina sequencing results demonstrated that specific unigenes are targeted utilizing the new Next Generation sequencing technologies and provide a framework to anchor these sequences.  The sequencing of the Lolium/Schedonorus/Festuca ESTs thus provides species specific sequences to evaluate expression and provides a molecular tool in the study of these important forage and turf grasses.