Screening and Identification of Differentially Expressed Genes in Reproductive Stage of Rice (Oryza sativa) Using Digital Differential Display Tools

Growth and development of any plant tissue due to variation in genes expression level related to each tissue, indicates the specific pattern of genes expression. The whole of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) of rice clustered in unigene sets in NCBI UniGene database that offer a platform for identifying differentially expressed genes in rice reproductive stage. This report illustrates a means to efficiency utilize this public database for gene expression (transcriptome) profiling reproductive stage. Using a data mining tool known as Digital Differential Display (DDD), comparisons were performed between 52 libraries of reproductive stage and 110 libraries of vegetative stage. DDD identified 812 specific unigene set in reproductive stage. Some of these genes encode for proteins such as prolamin, lipid transfer proteins, glutelin proteins and other unknown but novel gene sequences that's coded expression proteins without reveal functional. Also, part of genes screened was related to housekeeping genes. This study proves that the use of in silico analysis of the rice UniGene database led to the acceleration in create transcriptional profiles of known and novel genes in developing reproductive stage.