PERGOLA: fast and deterministic linkage mapping of polyploids.

Background: A large share of agriculturally and horticulturally important plant species are polyploid. Linkage maps are used to locate associations between genes and traits by breeders and geneticists. Linkage map creation for polyploid species is not supported by standard tools.

The design and cross-population application of a genome-wide SNP chip for the great tit Parus major.

The vast amount of phenotypic information collected in some wild animal populations makes them extremely valuable for unravelling the genetics of ecologically important traits and understanding how populations adapt to changes in their environment. Next generation sequencing has revolutionized the development of large marker panels in species previously lacking genomic resources. In this study, a unique genomics toolkit was developed for the great tit (Parus major), a model species in ecology and behavioural biology.

Genome-wide SNP detection in the great tit Parus major using high throughput sequencing.

Identifying genes that underlie ecological traits will open exiting possibilities to study gene-environment interactions in shaping phenotypes and in measuring natural selection on genes. Evolutionary ecology has been pursuing these objectives for decades, but they come into reach now that next generation sequencing technologies have dramatically lowered the costs to obtain the genomic sequence information that is currently lacking for most ecologically important species. Here we describe how we generated over 2 billion basepairs of novel sequence information for an ecological model species, the great tit Parus major.

Identification of distinct steps during tubule formation by the movement protein of Cowpea mosaic virus.

The movement protein (MP) of Cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) forms tubules through plasmodesmata in infected plants thus enabling virus particles to move from cell to cell. Localization studies of mutant MPs fused to GFP in protoplasts and plants identified several functional domains within the MP that are involved in distinct steps during tubule formation. Coinoculation experiments and the observation that one of the C-terminal deletion mutants accumulated uniformly in the plasma membrane suggest that dimeric or multimeric MP is first targeted to the plasma membrane.