The Apple EST project is the overall goal of this NSF project is to establish tools for use in apple functional genomics. The apple, Malus x domestica Borkh., is the most important deciduous tree fruit crop grown in the United States. This project will focus on developing genomic research tools and genome expression studies addressing flowering, fruiting, and pathogen response on a genome-wide scale. The first phase of this project is to construct an expressed sequence tag (EST) database of 120,000 sequences from flowering and fruiting tissues, and from tissues responding to pathogen infection, specifically to the bacterial pathogen Erwinia amylovora (the causal organism of fire blight disease) and to the fungal pathogen Venturia inaequalis (the causal organism of apple scab disease). These will be used to generate a set of 30,000 "unigene" set. This information will be fed to an educational and outreach effort to develop educational modules for high school teachers, youth, and the general public.

EST data can be searched and retrieved using the following methods:

Gene Ontology Browser
Search the database by entering a keyword to retrieve Gene Ontology recognized terms, and then view Apple EST annotation for each of those terms. The Gene Ontology Consortium documentation is available at GO documentation.

Sequence ID
Enter an EST ID, GENBANK accession ID, or Contig ID to retrieve and download the sequences, view the sequence chromatograph, view the contig structure and the view the sequence annotation.

Gene Association
Search the database by entering a Sequence ID or Human Unigene Number or Gene Symbol to retrieve annotated ESTs for that ID.

Search by BLAST
Cut and paste one or more sequences to BLAST against several EST data sets.

EST Annotations
Search by description: Enter a familiar gene or protein name or descriptive term, to look for closely related sequences in the apple EST collection. This function allows the searching on the description field of all records retrieved from the BLAST comparisons used in annotation.

Contig Viewer
Enter a contig id to view the consensus sequences that match with it.