Mining genetic resources via ecotilling

Abstract

The acquisition of genomic sequence data from plants has grown dramatically in the past decade. Sequence information from a single individual provides important insight into gene function, genome architecture and evolutionary relationships between species. Methods for rapid discovery and characterization of nucleotide polymorphisms have enabled investigations into nucleotide variation in a population of individuals of the same species, allowing deeper insight into genetic variation, gene function and flow in germplasm collections and wild populations. The Ecotilling method was developed as a high-throughput and low cost platform for the discovery of SNPs and small indels. Since its inception, Ecotilling has been adapted for more than 20 plant species for a range of applications including population genetics, mapping, and QTL cloning. I review here progress in the establishment of Ecotilling for diploid and polyploid plants, adaptation of the method for a variety of different investigations, and modifications to mutation discovery methods.