As the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP) was completed in 2005 and opened to the public, many countries are making a lot of investments in researches on the utilization of sequence information along with system development. Also, the necessity of the functional genomics researches using microarray is increased currently to secure unique genes related with major agricultural traits and analyze metabolic pathways. Microrarray enables efficient analysis of large scale gene expression and related transcription regulation. This review aims to introduce available microarrays made based on rice genome information and current status of gene expression analysis using these microarrays integrated with the databases available to the public. Also, we introduce the researches on the large scale functional analysis of genes related with useful traits and genetic networks. Understanding of the mechanism related with mutual interaction between proteins with co-expression among rice genes can be utilized in the researches for improving major agricultural traits. The direct and indirect interactions of various genes would provide new functionality of rice. The recent results of the various expression profiling analysis in rice will promote functional genomic researches in plants including rice and provide the scientists involved in applications researches with wide variety of expression informations.

Rice (Oryza sativa) is the most important staple crop in Korea. With its small genome size of 389Mb, rice is a model plant for genome research. We analyzed expressed sequence tag (EST) clones from immature seeds of rice (cv.Ilpum) at 20 days after heading. The 25,668 EST clones were clustered by using SeqMan program and 7,509 clones were selected as unique clones. We compared the 7,509 unique genes with KOME database including the 32,127 FL-cDNA in rice. Finally, 4,990 clones were homologous and 2,519 clones non-homologous to FL-cDNA clones. In addition, we mapped the 7,509 cDNA clones by using TIGR rice pseudomolecule version 5. Ultimately, 7,347 clones were matched to be significant clones related to the TIGR rice pseudomolecules, but 162 clones were unmapped. For the clustering of orthologous group genes, we further analyzed the 7,509 EST clones from immature seeds using NCBI clusters of orthologous groups database. Among the clones, 4,968 clones were categorized into information storage and processing, cellular processes and signaling, metabolism and poorly characterized genes, proportioning 799 (14.89%), 1,536 (28.3%), 1,148 (21.2%) and 1,936 (35.7%) clones to the previous four categories, respectively.

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