Bud sports are an important source of genetic variation in fruit crops. IGA has developed an efficient bioinformatic pipeline for the detection of somatic mutations in plant varieties. A protocol of validation of somatic variants is available for thousands of variant sites in a single-run experiment. IGA-subsidiary IGATech uses this know-how to offer a service of clone identification to breeding companies and plant nurseries.
We applied Illumina sequencing and this toolkit to investigate SNPs and structural variants in “cultivar” groups of sweet orange, and in ecotypes of different grape varieties.