Expressed sequence tags from Thellungiella halophila, a new model to study plant salt-tolerance

Accumulation and analysis of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) data from halophytic plant is a relatively rapid and cheap way for discovering new genes related to salinity tolerance. We constructed a NaCl-treated cDNA library of Thellungiella halophila and sequenced more than 1500 randomly selected clones. By sequence analysis, 813 unique clones were identified: 549 showed homology to previously identified genes, 264 matched uncharacterized genes. All our EST data are available on the Internet. The identity between T. halophila and Arabidopsis thaliana cDNA sequences in our EST collection are 95.76% in total ESTs and 95.36% in non-redundant clones. At least eight classes of genes were related to the salt-tolerance, which accounted for about 18.89% of total sequenced ESTs. T. halophila that has many features similar to Arabidopsis can be adopted as a halophytic model for stress-tolerance research.