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DEVELOPING PEANUT EXPRESSED SEQUENCE TAG (EST) LIBRARIES.  K. Chengalrayan and M. Gallo-Meagher.  Agronomy Department, and Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, University of Florida, Gainesville.

   Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is economically the second-most important seed legume grown in the US. It is among the world's most popular foods, and is a valuable source of protein and oil.  Additionally, peanut contains mostly unsaturated fat and resveratrol that lead to improved cardiovascular health. Peanut is also an excellent source of folic acid, and contains nearly half of the 13 essential vitamins and 35 percent of the essential minerals. Due to its nutritional value and other desirable traits, peanut is being investigated as one of NASA’s Advanced Life Support crops to be used in a planetary food system.
   Genomics technologies have created new opportunities to harness molecular genetic information to solve the current and future challenges facing crop production on earth, as well as on other planets.  However, unlike other major crops, few basic tools utilized in genomics are available for peanut. For example, hundreds of thousands of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from other legumes such as soybean have been deposited in GenBank. In contrast, only little more than one thousand recently submitted peanut ESTs exist.  It is essential that an EST collection of sequences from key peanut tissues be developed as a springboard to discover new genes, and obtain data on gene expression and regulation.  Toward this end, we constructed leaf, seed, and peg/pod cDNA libraries from developmentally-pooled tissues of ‘SunOleic 97R’ obtained from the field. These libraries are being sequenced and gene expression profiles developed. These studies will lead to a greater understanding of peanut's responses to various abiotic and biotic environments, and the ability to logically alter peanut to achieve maximum performance under given growth conditions.

(Supported by NASA: NAG 10-316.)