The aim of the project Novabreed was to identify novel variation in plants and study the composition of the plant pan-genome. The analysis of variation in plants has revealed that their genomes are characterised by high levels of structural variation, consisting of both smaller insertion/deletions, mostly due to recent insertions of transposable elements, and of larger insertion/deletion similar to those termed in humans Copy Number Variants (CNVs).
We hope that the abundance of results obtained by our project will help novel approaches for genetic assisted breeding, by incorporating SVs information into predictive and analytical models already developed for single nucleotide variation. The methods we developed have already been used in the field of regenerative medicine where we have contributed to detecting insertion sites of a transgene used in gene therapy to treat a child affected by a rare genetic disease. Read the final report
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