Systematic prediction of EMS-induced mutations in a sorghum mutant population

Sorghum is a next-generation crop species with tremendous potential for
discovering highly desirable agronomical traits. We described an improved
method for the systematic detection of EMS-induced mutations in the
previous sequencing of the M3 generation of 600 sorghum BTx623 mutants. We
used both SAMtools and GATK-based variant-calling algorithms to
demonstrate the general utility of the method. The approach also includes
a clustering algorithm for detecting likely false-negative EMS-induced
mutations. We detected 3,497,654 EMS-induced single nucleotide
polymorphisms (SNPs) in 30,285 distinct sorghum genes, and cataloged
10,263 high impact and 136,639 moderate impact SNPs. We also implemented a
light-weight web portal for searching the mutation database for the 600
sorghum mutants.