Contribution of transposons to structural variation and phenotypic diversity in tomato

Structural variation within plant genomes has fueled domestication and selection of traits critical for modern breeding of crop plants. Nevertheless, dissecting the diversity of structural variation at the population level has remained challenging. I will discuss how we revealed the extent and the genomic features of structural variants in 100 tomato accessions using long-read sequencing. I will show that transposons underlie a large fraction of structural variants. In a second part, I will provide a characterization of a transposon family that has driven structural variation and has facilitated the emergence of phenotypic variation in tomato.

Learning Objectives:
1. Dissection of the structural variation landscape in the tomato genome

2. Characterization of a transposon family involved in structural variation in the tomato genome