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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Ithaca, New York » Robert W. Holley Center for Agriculture & Health » Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #333841
Title: A proposal regarding best practices for validating the identity of genetic stocks and the effects of genetic variants

Author
item BERGELSON, JOY - University Of Chicago
item Buckler, Edward - Ed
item ECLER, JOSEPH - Salk Institute
item NORDBORG, MAGNUS - Gregor Mendel Institute
item WEIGEL, DETLEF - Max Planck Institute Of Molecular Plant Physiology

Submitted to: The Plant Cell
Publication Type: Other
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/8/2016
Publication Date: 3/8/2016
Citation: Bergelson, J., Buckler IV, E.S., Ecler, J., Nordborg, M., Weigel, D. 2016. A proposal regarding best practices for validating the identity of genetic stocks and the effects of genetic variants. The Plant Cell. 28(3):606.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Colleagues from the medical field have estimated that up to one third of cell lines are contaminated with other cell lines or are misidentified, and in addition, repeated passaging substantially changes cell line properties (reviewed in Hughes et al., 2007). The medical community has therefore begun to establish standards for verification of cell lines and genetic stocks, and NIH has announced efforts to require validation and to aid researchers in validating their biological material (Lorsch et al., 2014). Plant biologists should do the same. Even though the propagation of seed stocks cannot be directly compared to animal cell culture, contamination is a real possibility, and it is not uncommon that the same genetic stock produces different phenotypes in different laboratories. Confirming the genetic identity of research material is necessary to know whether such phenotypic differences reflect gene-by-environment (GxE) interactions, or whether they are simply due to apples being compared to oranges.