RESULTS: Marker-assisted foreground selection was performed using RM6836 and RM8225 to identify plants possessing blast resistance genes. Seventy microsatellite markers were used to estimate recurrent parent genome (RPG) recovery. Our analysis led to the development of 13 improved blast resistant lines with Piz, Pi2 and Pi9 broad-spectrum blast resistance genes and an MR219 genetic background. The RPG recovery of the selected improved lines was up to 97.70% with an average value of 95.98%. Selected improved lines showed a resistance response against the most virulent blast pathogen pathotype, P7.2. The selected improved lines did not express any negative effect on agronomic traits in comparison with MR219.
CONCLUSION: The research findings of this study will be a conducive approach for the application of different molecular techniques that may result in accelerating the development of new disease-resistant rice varieties, which in turn will match rising demand and food security worldwide. © 2016 Society of Chemical Industry.
RESULTS: We present an automated gene prediction pipeline, Seqping that uses self-training HMM models and transcriptomic data. The pipeline processes the genome and transcriptome sequences of the target species using GlimmerHMM, SNAP, and AUGUSTUS pipelines, followed by MAKER2 program to combine predictions from the three tools in association with the transcriptomic evidence. Seqping generates species-specific HMMs that are able to offer unbiased gene predictions. The pipeline was evaluated using the Oryza sativa and Arabidopsis thaliana genomes. Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCO) analysis showed that the pipeline was able to identify at least 95% of BUSCO's plantae dataset. Our evaluation shows that Seqping was able to generate better gene predictions compared to three HMM-based programs (MAKER2, GlimmerHMM and AUGUSTUS) using their respective available HMMs. Seqping had the highest accuracy in rice (0.5648 for CDS, 0.4468 for exon, and 0.6695 nucleotide structure) and A. thaliana (0.5808 for CDS, 0.5955 for exon, and 0.8839 nucleotide structure).
CONCLUSIONS: Seqping provides researchers a seamless pipeline to train species-specific HMMs and predict genes in newly sequenced or less-studied genomes. We conclude that the Seqping pipeline predictions are more accurate than gene predictions using the other three approaches with the default or available HMMs.