A short blossom period is a major obstacle for the tree peony industry. In order to preferentially isolate genes associated with flower senescence in the tree peony variety ‘Lu He Hong’, forward and reverse suppression subtractive hybridization cDNA libraries were constructed using senescent and blooming petals as testers, respectively. A total of 712 high-quality expressed sequence tags, representing 211 unigenes, were obtained, and 181 unigenes were annotated on the basis of sequence similarity with data in the National Center for Biotechno...