Autopolyploid inheritance and a heterozygous reciprocal translocation shape chromosome genetic behavior in tetraploid blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum).

Understanding chromosome recombination behavior in polyploidy species is key to advancing genetic discoveries. In blueberry, a tetraploid species, the line of evidences about its genetic behavior still remain poorly understood, owing to the inter-specific, and inter-ploidy admixture of its genome and lack of in depth genome-wide inheritance and comparative structural studies. Here we describe a new high-quality, phased, chromosome-scale genome of a diploid blueberry, clone W85. The genome was integrated with cytogenetics and high-density, genetic maps representing six tetraploid blueberry cultivars, harboring different levels of wild genome admixture, to uncover recombination behavior and structural genome divergence across tetraploid and wild diploid species. Analysis of chromosome inheritance and pairing demonstrated that tetraploid blueberry behaves as an autotetraploid with tetrasomic inheritance. Comparative analysis demonstrated the presence of a reciprocal, heterozygous, translocation spanning one homolog of chr-6 and one of chr-10 in the cultivar Draper. The translocation affects pairing and recombination of chromosomes 6 and 10. Besides the translocation detected in Draper, no other structural genomic divergences were detected across tetraploid cultivars and highly inter-crossable wild diploid species. These findings and resources will facilitate new genetic and comparative genomic studies in Vaccinium and the development of genomic assisted selection strategy for this crop.

A reference-grade wild soybean genome.

Efficient crop improvement depends on the application of accurate genetic information contained in diverse germplasm resources. Here we report a reference-grade genome of wild soybean accession W05, with a final assembled genome size of 1013.2 Mb and a contig N50 of 3.3 Mb. The analytical power of the W05 genome is demonstrated by several examples. First, we identify an inversion at the locus determining seed coat color during domestication. Second, a translocation event between chromosomes 11 and 13 of some genotypes is shown to interfere with the assignment of QTLs. Third, we find a region containing copy number variations of the Kunitz trypsin inhibitor (KTI) genes. Such findings illustrate the power of this assembly in the analysis of large structural variations in soybean germplasm collections. The wild soybean genome assembly has wide applications in comparative genomic and evolutionary studies, as well as in crop breeding and improvement programs.

Preparing a re-sequencing DNA library of 2 cancer candidate genes using the ligation-by-amplification protocol by two PCR reactions.

To meet the needs of large-scale genomic/genetic studies, the next-generation massively parallelized sequencing technologies provide high throughput, low cost and low labor-intensive sequencing service, with subsequent bioinformatic software and laboratory methods developed to expand their applications in various types of research. PCR-based genomic/genetic studies, which have significant usage in association studies like cancer research, haven't benefited much from those next-generation sequencing technologies, because the shortgun re-sequencing strategy used by such sequencing machines as the Illumina/Solexa Genome Analyzer may not be applied to direct re-sequencing of short-length target regions like those in PCR-based genomic/genetic studies. Although several methods have been proposed to solve this problem, including microarray-based genomic selections and selector-based technologies, they require advanced equipment and procedures which limit their applications in many laboratories. By contrast, we overcame such potential drawbacks by utilizing a ligation by amplification (LBA) protocol, a method using a pair of Universal Adapters to randomly ligate target regions in a two-step-PCR procedure, whose Long LBA products were easily fragmented and sequenced on the next-generation sequencing machine. In this concept-proven study, we chose the consensus coding sequences of two human cancer genes: BRCA1 and BRCA2 as target regions, specifically designed LBA primer pairs to amplify and randomly ligate them. 70 target sequences were successfully amplified and ligated into Long LBA products, which were then fragmented to construct DNA libraries for sequencing on both a conventional Sanger sequencer ABI 3730xl DNA Analyzer and the next-generation 'synthesis by sequencing technology' Illumina/Solexa Genome Analyzer. Bioinformatic analysis demonstrated the utility and efficiency (including the coverage and depth of each target sequence and the SNPs detection effectiveness) of using the LBA protocol in facilitating PCR-based re-sequencing and genetic-variant-detection studies on the next-generation sequencing machine, raising the prospect of various PCR-based genomic/genetic studies using this strategy.