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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 #377767
Research Project: Improving Crop Efficiency Using Genomic Diversity and Computational Modeling

Location: Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research

Title: rTASSEL: an R interface to TASSEL for association mapping of complex traits

Author
item MONIER, BRANDON - Cornell University
item CASSTEVENS, TERRY - Cornell University
item Buckler, Edward - Ed

Submitted to: bioRxiv
Publication Type: Other
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/22/2020
Publication Date: 7/22/2020
Citation: Monier, B., Casstevens, T.M., Buckler IV, E.S. 2020. rTASSEL: an R interface to TASSEL for association mapping of complex traits. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.21.209114.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.21.209114

Interpretive Summary: With the ever-growing amount of genomic data and resources, efficient and reproducible methods are needed for analysis. One such resource, TASSEL (Trait Analysis by aSSociation, Evolution and Linkage), was made available over a decade ago. While TASSEL provides powerful solutions for a variety of genomic questions, reproducibility and interactivity with other prominent analytical resources are lacking. Here, we present rTASSEL - an open-source software for accessing powerful TASSEL methods in the R computing environment. R provides the ability to (1) create straight-forward functionalities, (2) create reproducible analytical pipelines, (3) interact with many other prominent statistical and graphical libraries, and (4) operate in a user-friendly workspace. Developing this software allows for (1) increased user access as R is used by over 2 million individuals across the world in academia and health-related fields, (2) intuitive and reproducible pipelines that can be made with ease and rerun by other researchers, (3) integration with modern-day resources in the genomics and bioinformatics fields (e.g. Bioconductor and CRAN), and (4) open-source production to promote collaboration and greater access of usage.

Technical Abstract: The need for efficient tools and applications for analyzing genomic diversity is essential for any genetics research program. One such tool, TASSEL (Trait Analysis by aSSociation, Evolution and Linkage), provides many core methods for genomic analyses. Despite its efficiency, TASSEL has limited means for reproducible research and interacting with other analytical tools. Here we present an R package rTASSEL, a front-end to connect to a variety of highly used TASSEL methods and analytical tools. The goal of this package is to create a unified scripting workflow that exploits the analytical prowess of TASSEL in conjunction with R’s popular data handling and parsing capabilities without ever having the user to switch between these two environments.