LongTREC presents:
Evidence-based unification of potato gene models with the UniTato collaborative genome browser
Maja Zagorščak, Jan Zrimec, Carissa Bleker, Nadja Nolte, Mojca Juteršek, Živa Ramšak, Kristina Gruden, Marko Petek
Potato is a key food crop and a model for studying how plants cope with stresses such as drought and disease. To study it, scientists rely on its “genetic map”, which shows where each gene is and how it is built. Until now, potato had several versions of this map that didn’t agree. Genes had different names, some were missing, and others were wrongly split or fused, which made it hard to compare studies or reuse old data.
This work merges the two latest versions into a single unified map, UniTato, with a table that links old gene names to new ones. To make sure genes are correctly built, the authors used long-read RNA sequencing, which reads genetic messages from start to finish rather than in small fragments. This helped them spot and fix errors, such as a gene wrongly cut in two.
UniTato is freely available online (unitato.nib.si), where researchers can explore the genes and suggest corrections. It gives the potato research community a common, more accurate reference that can keep improving through collaboration.
Read the full text here: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2024.1352253
