摘要
Fabaceae is the third largest family of flowering plants and is unique among crops in their ability of fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Fabaceae is one of the few plant families with extensive genomic data available in multiple species. The unprecedented complexity and impending completeness of these data create opportunities for discovering new approaches. The Legume and Medicago share much-conserved colinearity between their genomes which can be exploited for the genomic research in Leguminosae crops. In this study, 1,952,191 ESTs of 8 Leguminosae species were clustered into unigenes contigs and compared with Medicago truncatula gene indices. Almost all the unigenes of Leguminosae species showed high similarity with Medicago genes, except for those of Lens culinaris, where 95% of unigenes were found similar. A total of 10,874 SSRs were identified in the unigenes. Functional annotation of unigenes showed that the majority of the genes are present in metabolism and energy functional classes. It is expected that comparative genomic analysis between Medicago and related crop species will expedite research in other Legume species. This would be helpful for genomics as well as evolutionary studies, and the DNA markers developed can be used for mapping, tagging and cloning of specific important genes in Leguminosae.
