Annotation of stress responsive candidate genes in peanut ESTs

Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is an internationally important crop for human consumption as a good source of protein and vegetable oil. Peanut is widely cultivated around the world in tropical, sub-tropical and warm temperate climate. Because of its huge genome size (2.8 Gb) and unsequenced genome, studies on genomics and genetic modification of peanut are less as compared to other model crops. As peanut can be cultivated in arid and semi-arid regions, and its growth is drastically affected by various stresses that reduces the yield. Therefore, study on stress responsive genes and its regulation are very much important. Here we report about the identification and annotation of some stress responsive candidate genes using peanut Expressed Sequences Tags (ESTs). The selection of genes was based on the publically available expression data. Due to good expression data and lack of available literature in peanut some of the stress responsive genes were screened. Individual EST of the said group were further searched in peanut ESTs (1, 78,490 whole EST sequences) using computational approach. Various tools like Vec-Screen, Repeat Masker, EST Trimmer, DNA Baser and WISE2 were being used for stress responsive gene identification and annotation. Research progress made towards contigs assembly, determination of biological function of genes, and prediction of domain as well as 3D structure for related protein are included.