Project description:A collection of 237,000 expressed sequence tags generated by the Sugarcane EST sequencing project (SUCEST) was analyzed in search of signal transduction components. The SUCAST (Sugarcane Signal Transduction) Catalogue contains over 3500 components, with around 2900 involved in several aspects of cell signaling and transcription. Sequence comparisons and conserved protein domain analysis revealed 477 receptors, 510 protein kinases, 107 protein phosphatases, a large number of small GTPases, G-proteins, members of the calcium and inositol metabolism, and other signal transduction-related proteins. Over 600 transcription factors were also indexed. Moreover, 437 genes with no matches in the public databases and 111 genes of unknown function were catalogued. Several of the SUCEST cDNA libraries were derived from plants submitted to abiotic stresses or infected with endophytic nitrogen fixing bacteria and stress and pathogen response-related genes were also annotated. The abundance of transcripts among six different sugarcane tissues (flowers, roots, leaves, lateral buds, 1st and 4th internodes) was evaluated using microarrays and expression profile clustering. We identified 216 genes that are significantly more abundant in one of the tissues analyzed. A subset of the data was validated by real-time PCR. Additionally, genes with similar expression levels among different tissues were identified. The characterization of these elements and their promoters can aid in the development of tools for the genetic manipulation of this plant species and other economically important grasses. Keywords: other