Expressed sequence tags from wheat roots under hypoxia

Hypoxia due to waterlogging adversely affects agricultural crops in many parts of the world and severely impacts overall annual production levels. To evaluate the response of wheat roots to a controlled hypoxic environment at the level of transcription, a cDNA library was constructed using hypoxia-stressed wheat. A total of 1274 clones (94.8%) out of 1344 sequences were found to be at least 50 bp long. Phrap assembly using high quality sequences formed 879 sets of non-overlapping sequences. Based on BLASTx analysis against the nonredundant database, a total of 494 unigenes showed a high homology to the registered amino acid sequences of plant (E < e(-10)). A total of 112 unigenes, which were not matched to any wheat ESTs in the database, were detected. A functional classification of 118 clones whose transcript levels were evaluated under hypoxia was performed according to gene ontology. These results may provide useful information for further investigations to better understand the response of wheat roots to waterlogging.