Acquacoltura Pubblicazione scientifica PERGOLA: fast and deterministic linkage mapping of polyploids FILONE TECNOLOGICO TEMA produzione e raccolta RIASSUNTO BackgroundA large share of agriculturally and horticulturally important plant species are polyploid. Linkage maps are used to locate associations between genes and traits by breeders and geneticists. Linkage map creation for polyploid species is not supported by standard tools. We want to overcome this limitation and validate our results with simulation studies.ResultsWe developed PERGOLA, a deterministic and heuristic method that addresses this problem. We show that it creates correct linkage groups, marker orders and distances for simulated and real datasets. We compare it to existing tools and demonstrate that it overcomes limitations in ploidy and outperforms them in computational time and mapping accuracy. We represent linkage maps as dendrograms and show that this has advantages in the comparison of different maps.ConclusionsPERGOLA can be used successfully to calculate linkage maps for diploid and polyploid species and outperforms existing tools.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-016-1416-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. DATA Data di pubblicazione: 04/01/2017 AUTORI GRANDKE FABIAN RANGANATHAN SOUMYA VAN BERS NIKKIE DE HAAN JORN R METZLER DIRK RIVISTA BMC Bioinformatics, 18, 12 IMPACT FACTOR 2,610