Seed & plant quality assay development
Assay to check genetic makeup of seed/plant material
In cooperation with seed companies or service laboratories, easy to use DNA based assays are developed.
These assays are applied for quality issues such as presence of pathogens, contamination (seeds or pollen), percentage of hybrid seeds, somaclonal variation, etc.
Benefits
- Very fast and secure testing;
- higher accuracy and time saving on (phenotypic) quality tests; multiplex testing of different traits;
- Interesting to test high volumes at low running costs.
Applications
- Hybrid purity control;
- test for homogeneity;
- true-ness to type test;
- trace-ability;
- Identity confirmation.
Deliverables
- Simple easy to use PCR assay for in-house use;
- Multiplexed assays that combine two or more assays in one PCR reaction (SNPWave).
Examples
Identity confirmation
An example of an identity control is given in Figure 1. From variety A and B 3 pools are fingerprinted and from 3 seed lots 6 pools of 10 individuals are tested. It was found that seedlots 1 and 2 are variety A and seed lot 3 is similar to variety B. Two specific markers, which discriminate between the two varieties, are highlighted.
Figure 1: Part of a fingerprint for an identity analysis; from left to right 3 pools of variety A, 3 pools of variety B, and 6 pools of seed lots 1, 2 and 3.
Quality control
An example of a quality control AFLP fingerprint is shown in Figure 2. From three different lines 12 pools of 5 individuals are tested. It is found that in Line 2 two pools and in Line 3 three pools are contaminated. The identity of the contamination can be found by using the marker database.
Figure 2: An example of an AFLP fingerprint to check the purity of three different lines.