IWGSC Sequence Repository: Moving towards tools to facilitate data integration for the reference sequence of wheat

URGI is a genomics and bioinformatics research unit at INRA (French National institute for Agricultural Research), dedicated to plants and crop parasites. We develop and maintain a genomic and genetic Information System called GnpIS that manages multiple types of wheat data. Under the umbrella of the IWGSC (International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium), we have set up a Sequence Repository on the Wheat@URGI website to store, browse and BLAST the data being generated by the wheat genome project: http://wheat-urgi.versailles.inra.fr/Seq-Repository. The repository holds the wheat physical maps, the chromosome survey sequence data for the individual chromosomes of breadwheat, draft sequences for diploid and tetraploid wheats and provides browsable access to the BAC-based reference sequence for chromosome 3B, the first of the chromosomes to be completed by the consortium. I will highlight the new features and data available in the Sequence Repository (e.g., new BLAST functionalities) and, in particular, present what we have done to address needs and concerns raised during the IWGSC S&P workshop last year. In addition, I will open the discussion about the future needs for tools to facilitate the integration of data to produce the reference sequence

The GenTree Dendroecological Collection, tree-ring and wood density data from seven tree species across Europe

The dataset presented here was collected by the GenTree project (EU-Horizon 2020), which aims to improve the use of forest genetic resources across Europe by better understanding how trees adapt to their local environment. This dataset of individual tree-core characteristics including ring-width series and whole-core wood density was collected for seven ecologically and economically important European tree species: silver birch (Betula pendula), European beech (Fagus sylvatica), Norway spruce (Picea abies), European black poplar (Populus nigra), maritime pine (Pinus pinaster), Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), and sessile oak (Quercus petraea). Tree-ring width measurements were obtained from 3600 trees in 142 populations and whole-core wood density was measured for 3098 trees in 125 populations. This dataset covers most of the geographical and climatic range occupied by the selected species. The potential use of it will be highly valuable for assessing ecological and evolutionary responses to environmental conditions as well as for model development and parameterization, to predict adaptability under climate change scenarios

The GenTree Platform: growth traits and tree-level environmental data in 12 European forest tree species

Background: Progress in the field of evolutionary forest ecology has been hampered by the huge challenge of phenotyping trees across their ranges in their natural environments, and the limitation in high-resolution environmental information. Findings: The GenTree Platform contains phenotypic and environmental data from 4,959 trees from 12 ecologically and economically important European forest tree species: Abies alba Mill. (silver fir), Betula pendula Roth. (silver birch), Fagus sylvatica L. (European beech), Picea abies (L.) H. Karst (Norway spruce), Pinus cembra L. (Swiss stone pine), Pinus halepensis Mill. (Aleppo pine), Pinus nigra Arnold (European black pine), Pinus pinaster Aiton (maritime pine), Pinus sylvestris L. (Scots pine), Populus nigra L. (European black poplar), Taxus baccata L. (English yew), and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl. (sessile oak). Phenotypic (height, diameter at breast height, crown size, bark thickness, biomass, straightness, forking, branch angle, fructification), regeneration, environmental in situ measurements (soil depth, vegetation cover, competition indices), and environmental modeling data extracted by using bilinear interpolation accounting for surrounding conditions of each tree (precipitation, temperature, insolation, drought indices) were obtained from trees in 194 sites covering the species’ geographic ranges and reflecting local environmental gradients. Conclusion: The GenTree Platform is a new resource for investigating ecological and evolutionary processes in forest trees. The coherent phenotyping and environmental characterization across 12 species in their European ranges allow for a wide range of analyses from forest ecologists, conservationists, and macro-ecologists. Also, the data here presented can be linked to the GenTree Dendroecological collection, the GenTree Leaf Trait collection, and the GenTree Genomic collection presented elsewhere, which together build the largest evolutionary forest ecology data collection available

Between but not within species variation in the distribution of fitness effects

New mutations provide the raw material for evolution and adaptation. The distribution of fitness effects (DFE) describes the spectrum of effects of new mutations that can occur along a genome, and is therefore of vital interest in evolutionary biology. Recent work has uncovered striking similarities in the DFE between closely related species, prompting us to ask whether there is variation in the DFE among populations of the same species, or among species with different degrees of divergence, i.e., whether there is variation in the DFE at different levels of evolution. Using exome capture data from six tree species sampled across Europe we characterised the DFE for multiple species, and for each species, multiple populations, and investigated the factors potentially influencing the DFE, such as demography, population divergence and genetic background. We find statistical support for there being variation in the DFE at the species level, even among relatively closely related species. However, we find very little difference at the population level, suggesting that differences in the DFE are primarily driven by deep features of species biology, and that evolutionarily recent events, such as demographic changes and local adaptation, have little impact

YOC, A new strategy for pairwise alignment of collinear genomes

Background: Comparing and aligning genomes is a key step in analyzing closely related genomes. Despite the development of many genome aligners in the last 15 years, the problem is not yet fully resolved, even when aligning closely related bacterial genomes of the same species. In addition, no procedures are available to assess the quality of genome alignments or to compare genome aligners.[br/] Results: We designed an original method for pairwise genome alignment, named YOC, which employs a highly sensitive similarity detection method together with a recent collinear chaining strategy that allows overlaps. YOC improves the reliability of collinear genome alignments, while preserving or even improving sensitivity. We also propose an original qualitative evaluation criterion for measuring the relevance of genome alignments. We used this criterion to compare and benchmark YOC with five recent genome aligners on large bacterial genome datasets, and showed it is suitable for identifying the specificities and the potential flaws of their underlying strategies.[br/] Conclusions: The YOC prototype is available at https://github.com/ruricaru/YOC. It has several advantages over existing genome aligners: (1) it is based on a simplified two phase alignment strategy, (2) it is easy to parameterize (3), it produces reliable genome alignments, which are easier to analyze and to use

Plant Data Managment for Phenotyping Experiments: Data standards and use cases for plant scientists and informaticians

École thématiqueThe Minimal Information About Plant Phenotyping Experiment, MIAPPE (www.miappe.org), has been designed by ELIXIR, EMPHASIS and Bioversity international, to guide plant scientist in the management of experimental data. Furthermore, since genetic studies relies on the integration and the linking between phenotype and genotype datasets, relevant section of MIAPPE are beginning to be used for genotyping standards.This Webinar will give an overview of the current practices and methods for plant phenotyping data standardization, and how to deal with the variability and heterogeneity inherent to research and breeding data sets. Data management approaches at some of the major research organizations will be given as examples

An integrated information system dedicated to oak genomics and genetics

GnpIS is an information system designed to integrate and link genomic, genetic and environmental data into a single environment dedicated to plant (crops and forest trees) and fungi data. GnpIS is regularly improved with new functionalities answering specific needs raised by scientists and released several times a year. We propose to illustrate the integrated genome annotation system we set up with a focus on the interoperability between genomic and genetic data (e.g. Markers, QTL) present in GnpIS-core, through the use case Quercus robur (the pedunculate oak), a large, complex and highly heterozygous genome. This genome annotation system relies on GMOD interfaces such as WebApollo/JBrowse and Intermine to make these data available under a user-friendly environment. All annotations and analysis results (Transposable Elements (TEs), genes, ncRNA ...) and functional annotation (protein-coding genes) were obtained using powerful and robust pipelines: (i) REPET used to detect, classify and annotate TEs representing 50% of the genome; (ii) Eugene which integrates ab initio and similarity gene finding softwares to predict gene models; (iii) ncRNA were annotated using different tools to annotate lncRNA, miRNA, rRNA, tRNA (iv) A functional annotation pipeline mainly based on Interproscan and comparative genomics was performed on the 25,808 highly confident predicted proteins. This system allows experts to analyze their protein families of interest and curate/validate gene structure. All together these resources provide a framework to study the two key evolutionary processes that explain the remarkable diversity found within the Quercus genus: local adaptation and speciation

Plant Science Data Integration, from Building Community Standards to Defining a Consistent Data Lifecycle

FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles for plant research build upon experience from other life science domains such as genomics. But plant specificities, e.g. plant-environment interactions or phenotypes, require tailored solutions. Major global players have joined forces to answer that challenge with the Minimal Information About a Plant Phenotyping Experiment (MIAPPE, www.miappe.org) that handles general metadata organization and its companion web service API, the Breeding API (www.brapi.org). Both rely on two established data standards, the MultiCrop Passport Descriptors (MCPD) for identification of plant genetic resources and the Crop Ontology (www.cropontology.org) for trait documentation. Researcher communities’ coordination and collaborative approaches have enabled the success and adoption of MIAPPE and led to a general data lifecycle description by ELIXIR Plant Sciences Community to identify gaps and needed developments. A priority has been placed on addressing the “first mile” of data publishing, i.e. the gathering and documentation of data by the researcher, which enables relevant data findability and reusability. Here we describe the existing ecosystem of tools and standards for plant scientists as well as their history, including their convergence through the use of MIAPPE for describing genotyping datasets

Web services for microbial genome annotation using data integration

National audienc