SNP Discovery and Genetic Diversity in Dandelion.

The name dandelion refers to the members of Taraxacum which is a large genus of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae. T. officinale or called common dandelion is very valuable for its medical function and the Russian dandelion, T. kok-saghyz, can be used for rubber production. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers are very important for plant genetics and molecular breeding due to their abundance in the genomes and amenability for high-throughput detection platforms. In this study, the availability of SNPs for T. officinale and T. kok-saghyz were assessed using the expressed sequence tags (ESTs) downloaded from GenBank. The software DNASTAR Lasergene Genomics Suite was used for EST sequence assembly and SNP discovery. There are 6,338 contigs assembled from the total of 41,296 ESTs of T. officinale, and 588 contigs from 11,710 ESTs of T. kok-saghyz. A total of 22,982 SNPs were postulated from 2,383 (37.6%) contigs in the ESTs of T. officinale, and 4,288 SNPs were found from 588 contigs of T. kok-saghyz. However, the non-redundant contigs were only 761 (31.9%) which had 2,405 SNPs in T. officinale and only 82 (13.9%) which contained 179 SNPs in T. kok-saghyz. The SNP validation is currently in progress. This study will provide the useful information through SNP marker discovery for dandelion molecular breeding.