NGS-Enabled Research Tools for Crops and Livestock

Agriculture faces enormous challenges driven by growing populations, changing diets, the globalization of markets and new uses for agricultural products, ecological concerns, increased costs and reduced availabilities of agricultural inputs, and the impacts of global climate change.  The R&D cost per unit of genetic gain is increasing annually in maize and yields have plateaued in other crops.As a consequence of public-sector investments in the human genome project the cost of DNA sequencing has plummeted faster than Moore’s Law for computers.  This Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) revolution is creating new opportunities for crop improvement. Methods by which NGS technologies can be used to efficiently and cost-effectively identify genetic diversity (e.g., SNPs), identify markers associated with qualitative traits (BSR-Seq), and genotype breeding populations (tGBS) to map quantitative traits will be described.