Taxus cuspidata Transcriptome or Gene expression

Taxus cuspidata Sieb. et Zucc is mainly distrubuted in Northeast China and adjacent countries. As a tertiary relic species, it is highly valued serve as a renewable resource for the production of antineoplastic diterpenoid, Taxol. Though the biosynthesis pathway of Taxol has been studied extensively, there are still some steps remaining unclear. In contrast to crops or model plants, Taxus is generally limited in genomic or tanscriptomic as demonstrated only 179 ESTs in GenBank. In this study, we produced 81,148 high-quality (HQ) reads from a cDNA library constructed from the needles of T. cuspidata, using the Roche 454-GS FLX Titanium platform. We will focus on uncovering genes responsible for the secondary metabolite biosynthesis and transcriptional regulation, in an effort to providing the largest ESTs resources for future studies.