The Maize Gene Discovery group, including John Fernandes and Virginia Walbot from Stanford, wrote a manuscript for Plant Physiology analyzing the organ-specificity of gene expression patterns using ESTs and microarray analysis.  The important finding is that both methods demonstrate low (10-15%) overlap in the suite of expressed genes at discrete developmental stages (i.e., 1 mm, 0.5 - 2 cm, and 5 cm tassels) and in comparisons between organs.  Below are a interesting results from the EST sequencing.

 Pie chart showing low overlap found between library 605 (kernel) and 949 (juvenlie leaf)

 

 Doughnut chart showing library 606 (ear) compared to several other EST libraries

 

  Proteins found in almost all of the EST libraries with the count of ESTs from each numbered library