Future tools for association mapping in crop plantsThis article is one of a selection of papers from the conference “Exploiting Genome-wide Association in Oilseed Brassicas: a model for genetic improvement of major OECD crops for sustainable farming”.

Abstract

Association mapping currently relies on the identification of genetic markers. Several technologies have been adopted for genetic marker analysis, with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) being the most popular where a reasonable quantity of genome sequence data are available. We describe several tools we have developed for the discovery, annotation, and visualization of molecular markers for association mapping. These include autoSNPdb for SNP discovery from assembled sequence data; TAGdb for the identification of gene specific paired read Illumina GAII data; CMap3D for the comparison of mapped genetic and physical markers; and BAC and Gene Annotator for the online annotation of genes and genomic sequences.