As a seafood, olive flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus) is among the most expensive of marine fish products in Korea and Japan. With increased production and intensive culture, mass mortalities associated with extreme environmental change, for example, temperature, or pathogenesis diseases have often occurred in aquaculture farm.

More recently, biotechnology, molecular genetics and genomics has begun to play a role with the isolation of fish genes influencing a variety of physiological or immunological process. The analysis of these genes individually or lump together in the network system is very helpful and powerful strategy to understand fundamentally physiological and immunological mechanism of fish.

We constructed cDNA libraries from several main organs of Olive flounder (Parlichthys olivaceus); liver, brain, kidney, stomach, eye, intestine, gill, etc. From these libraries, we have partially sequenced more 4,000 ESTs in average, and automatically performed BLAST searches. Furthermore, those ESTs known or unknown genes through the BLAST search could be selected for cDNA microarray (DNA chips). Using arrays, expression levels of thousands of genes can be determined at once in a single set of experiments, yielding vast and far-reaching results.

General evaluation of EST libraries from 12 different tissues of olive flounder