Development and mapping of SNP assays in allotetraploid cotton

A Long-Read Transcriptome Assembly of Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) and Intraspecific Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Discovery

Upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) has a narrow germplasm base, which constrains marker development and hampers intraspecific breeding. A pressing need exists for high-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers that can be readily applied to germplasm in breeding and breeding-related research programs. Despite progress made in developing new sequencing technologies during the past decade, the cost of sequencing remains substantial when one is dealing with numerous samples and large genomes. Several strategies have been proposed to lower the cost of sequencing for multiple genotypes of large-genome species like cotton, such as transcriptome sequencing and reduced-representation DNA sequencing. This paper reports the development of a transcriptome assembly of the inbred line Texas Marker-1 (TM-1), a genetic standard for cotton, its usefulness as a reference for RNA sequencing (RNA-seq)-based SNP identification, and the availability of transcriptome sequences of four other cotton cultivars. An assembly of TM-1 was made using Roche 454 transcriptome reads combined with an assembly of all available public expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences of TM-1. The TM-1 assembly consists of 72,450 contigs with a total of 70 million bp. Functional predictions of the transcripts were estimated by alignment to selected protein databases. Transcriptome sequences of the five lines, including TM-1, were obtained using an Illumina Genome Analyzer-II, and the short reads were mapped to the TM-1 assembly to discover SNPs among the five lines. We identified >14,000 unfiltered allelic SNPs, of which ∼3,700 SNPs were retained for assay development after applying several rigorous filters. This paper reports availability of the reference transcriptome assembly and shows its utility in developing intraspecific SNP markers in upland cotton.

Detection, Validation, and Application of Genotyping-by-Sequencing Based Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in Upland Cotton

The presence of two closely related subgenomes in the allotetraploid Upland cotton, combined with a narrow genetic base of the cultivated varieties, has hindered the identification of polymorphic genetic markers and their use in improving this important crop. Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) is a rapid way to identify single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers; however, these SNPs may be specific to the sequenced cotton lines. Our objective was to obtain a large set of polymorphic SNPs with broad applicability to the cultivated cotton germplasm. We selected 11 diverse cultivars and their random-mated recombinant inbred progeny for SNP marker development via GBS. Two different GBS methodologies were used by Data2Bio (D2B) and the Institute for Genome Diversity (IGD) to identify 4441 and 1176 polymorphic SNPs with minor allele frequency of ≥0.1, respectively. We further filtered the SNPs and aligned their sequences to the diploid Gossypium raimondii reference genome. We were able to use homeologous SNPs to assign 1071 SNP loci to the At subgenome and 1223 to the Dt subgenome. These filtered SNPs were located in genic regions about twice as frequently as expected by chance. We tested 111 of the SNPs in 154 diverse Upland cotton lines, which confirmed the utility of the SNP markers developed in such approach. Not only were the SNPs identified in the 11 cultivars present in the 154 cotton lines, no two cultivars had identical SNP genotypes. We conclude that GBS can be easily used to discover SNPs in Upland cotton, which can be converted to functional genotypic assays for use in breeding and genetic studies.