Construction of a Full-length cDNA Library from Cardamine manshurica Nakai and Characterization of EST Dataset

Brassicaceae consists of important species that have significant amounts of metabolites, and many studies have been carried out in order to understand the mechanism that improves the content of these metabolites. In Brassicacea, Cardamine manshurica Nakai is one of the important edible plants and is rich in oil, fiber, and various nutrients. In this study, we constructed cDNA library using leaves from 4 week-old plants and analyzed the ESTs of C. manshurica Nakai. One thousand thirty-nine ESTs were discovered which assembled to form 468 unigenes. The latter contained 116 contigs and 352 singletons. Similarity search of these ESTs with BLASTX revealed similarities with Arabidopsis thaliana 285 (31.9%), Arabidopsis lyrata 172 (19.3%), Capsella rubella 162 (18.1%), and Eutrema salsugineum 137 (15.3%). ESTs were functionally categorized into molecular function, biological process, and cellular component, and each category took 10.6%, 58.5%, and 30.9%, respectively. The functional analysis also found that 94.9% of ESTs showed at least one GO ID. Microsatellite analysis of 468 unigene sequences revealed 225 structures of which Di-, Tri-, Tetra-, Penta-repeats were 35.6% (80/225), 63.1% (142/225), 0.9% (2/225), and 0.4% (1/225), respectively. The results from our study can be a valuable resource for Cardamine research.