Degree of Variations in Plant Genomes

Degree of differences between plant genomes varies from single nucleotide polymorphisms to large-scale duplications, deletions and rearrangements. The large polymorphisms are termed structural variants (SVs). SVs have received significant attention in human genetics and were found to be responsible for various chronic diseases. However, minute effort has been directed towards understanding the role of SVs in plants. Many recent advances in plant genetics have resulted from improvements in high-resolution technologies for measuring SVs, including microarray-based techniques, and more recently, high-throughput DNA sequencing. In this review we describe recent reports of SV in plants and describe the genomic technologies currently used to measure these SVs.