Comparative analysis of expressed sequence tags from Flammulina velutipes at different developmental stages

Flammulina velutipes is a popular edible basidiomycete mushroom found in East Asia and is commonly known as winter mushroom. Mushroom development showing dramatic morphological changes by different environmental factors is scientifically and commercially interesting. To create a genetic database and isolate genes regulated during mushroom development, cDNA libraries were constructed from three developmental stages of mycelium, primordium, and fruit body in F. velutipes. We generated a total of 5,431 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from randomly selected clones from the three cDNA libraries. Of these, 3,332 different unique genes (unigenes) were consistent with 2,442 (73%) singlets and 890 (27%) contigs. This corresponds to a redundancy of 39%. Using a homology search in the gene ontology database, the EST unigenes were classified into the three categories of molecular function (28%), biological process (29%), and cellular component (6%). Comparative analysis found great variations in the unigene expression pattern among the three different unigene sets generated from the cDNA libraries of mycelium, primordium, and fruit body. The 19-34% of total unigenes were unique to each unigene set and only 3% were shared among all three unigene sets. The unique and common representation in F. velutipes unigenes from the three different cDNA libraries suggests great differential gene expression profiles during the different developmental stages of F. velutipes mushroom.