0338709 Quackenbush<br/><br/><br/>The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) has been awarded a grant to expand and continue development of the TIGR Plant Gene Indices (http://www.tigr.org/tdb/tgi.shtml). Sequencing of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) has provided a first glimpse of the collection of transcribed sequences in many organisms, and significant additional information can be obtained by a thorough analysis of the EST data. The total indices currently represent more than 60 species: 19 plant species, 22 animal species, 13 protists, and 7 fungal species. The continuation of this project will allow TIGR to continue to provide these databases and resources to the community (free of charge) and to continue development of additional features that will enhance the annotation currently provided, including the identification of SNPs, prediction of a collection of 70-mer sequences for microarrays, and the creation of a plant version of the Resourcer tool. These databases are produced using highly refined and accurate computational protocols designed to reconstruct transcripts represented by the data, to assign preliminary annotation to those reconstructed sequences, to map them to an increasing number of completely sequenced genomes, and to identify orthologous genes. The results are provided through an easily accessible web-interface and that presents additional analysis, including the identification of putative orthologous genes. As such, the TGIR indices provide a valuable resource for the research community and providing analysis of ESTs for many ongoing projects funded by the NSF and other federal agencies.