Teak (Tectona grandis Linn.f.) is an important forest
tree of Thailand valued for its wood. Teakwood is resistant
against termite (Coptotermes gestroi) attack. However,
teak trees suffer from insect pests feeding on the leaves
(among them teak skeletonizer and teak defoliator) and
shoots (teak shoot borer) which lead to lost growth and
lower value of the wood. Therefore this project aimed to
make a compilation of genes that have been demonstrated
to be involved in resistance against insect pests in various
plants and discover the corresponding genes in teak.
The Arabidopsis Information Resource was searched for
genes which had been annotated to be involved in insect
resistance and the corresponding coding sequences
(CDS) were retrieved. The BLASTN programme was used
to search for similar coding sequences derived from plant
species phylogenetically more closely related to teak in the
NCBI Databases (NR and EST databases). These
sequences were then used to retrieve teak genome
regions (scaffolds) from the teak genome assembly using
BLASTN. The AUGUSTUS programme was used to
predict gene coding regions in the selected scaffolds
which resulted in the discovery of seven genes with high
similarity to resistance gene against insect pests.
Alignments were constructed to compare the nucleotide
sequences of the genes from teak with those from other
plants. The results confirmed the location of the genes in
teak including potential start and stop codons and introns.
This information could be combined with the discovery of
polymorphisms in teak for future research such as the
design of DNA-based markers to study the function and
inheritance of these genes.