Background: Micro RNAs (miRNAs) are a pivotal part of non-protein-coding endogenous small RNA molecules that regulate the genes involved in plant growth and development, and respond to biotic and abiotic environmental stresses posttranscriptionally.Objective: In the present study, we report the results of a systemic search for identifi cation of new miRNAs in B. rapa using homology-based ...

We present a web-based server, called ESTpass, for processing and annotating sequence data from expressed sequence tag (EST) projects. ESTpass accepts a FASTA-formatted EST file and its quality file as inputs, and it then executes a back-end EST analysis pipeline consisting of three consecutive steps. The first is cleansing the input EST sequences. The second is clustering and assembling the cl...

We present a web-based server, called ESTpass, for processing and annotating sequence data from expressed sequence tag (EST) projects. ESTpass accepts a FASTA-formatted EST file and its quality file as inputs, and it then executes a back-end EST analysis pipeline consisting of three consecutive steps. The first is cleansing the input EST sequences. The second is clustering and assembling the cl...

While genome sequencing projects are advancing rapidly, EST sequencing and analysis remains a primary research tool for the identification and categorization of gene sequences in a wide variety of species and an important resource for annotation of genomic sequence. The TIGR Gene Indices (http://www.tigr.org/tdb/tgi. shtml) are a collection of species-specific databases that use a highly refine...

The crop expressed sequence tag database, CR-EST (http://pgrc.ipk-gatersleben.de/cr-est/), is a publicly available online resource providing access to sequence, classification, clustering and annotation data of crop EST projects. CR-EST currently holds more than 200,000 sequences derived from 41 cDNA libraries of four species: barley, wheat, pea and potato. The barley section comprises approxim...

The generation of expressed sequence tag (EST) libraries offers an affordable approach to investigate organisms, if no genome sequence is available. OREST (http://mips.gsf.de/genre/proj/orest/index.html) is a server-based EST analysis pipeline, which allows the rapid analysis of large amounts of ESTs or cDNAs from mammalia and fungi. In order to assign the ESTs to genes or proteins OREST maps D...

High throughput genome (HTG) and expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences are currently the most abundant nucleotide sequence classes in the public database. The large volume, high degree of fragmentation and lack of gene structure annotations prevent efficient and effective searches of HTG and EST data for protein sequence homologies by standard search methods. Here, we briefly describe three ne...

Producing spliced EST sequences is a fundamental task in the computational problem of reconstructing splice and transcript variants, a crucial step in the alternative splicing investigation. Now, given an EST sequence, there can be several spliced EST sequences associated to it, since the original EST sequences may have different alignments against wide genomic regions. In this paper we address...