Huperzia serrata Transcriptome or Gene expression

H. serrata, the representative members of the Huperziaceae family, produce various types of lycopodium alkaloids. The lycopodium alkaloids possess pharmaceutical applications, especially huperzine A, which was used as a candidate drug for the treatment of Alzheimer disease. Despite their medical importance, little genomic or transcriptomic data are available for the members of this family. We used massively parallel pyrosequencing on the Roche 454-GS FLX Titanium platform to generate a substantial EST dataset for H. serrata. We will focus on gene discovery in the areas of the secondary metabolite biosynthesis, the transcriptional regulation and the genetic marker detection.