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Variation data in tomato

  1. Go to Ensembl Plants and find the Solyc02g084570.3 gene in Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) and go to its Location tab. Can you see the variation track?

  2. Zoom in around the last exon of this gene. What are the different types of variants seen in that region? Are any splice region variants mapped in the region? If so, what is/are the coordinate(s)?

  1. Select Solanum lycopersicum from the Species search drop-down menu and search for Solyc02g084570.3. In the results page, you can click on the coordinates 2:48284598-48288482 to go straight to the Location tab. Scroll down to the Region in detail view. The variation track is shown at the bottom of the view.

    If you don’t see the Variation - All sources track, click Configure this page on the left-hand panel, search for the track in the pop-up menu and enable the track by clicking on the square next to the track name. Close the pop-up window and wait for the track to load.

  2. Zoom in around the last exon of this gene by drawing a box in the respective region (you can change your mouse action by clicking the Drag/Select icons at the top right-hand corner of the view). Note the gene is on the reverse strand (this is signified by the < sign next to the transcript name, and it is located below the Contigs track), so the last exon will be on the left hand side of that image. The variation legend is shown at the bottom of the page, telling you what the colours mean.

    The types of variants seen in that region are 3’ UTR, missense, synonymous and splice region variants.

    Splice region variants are shown in orange. Click on the variants to get additional information on that variant including location. You can zoom into the region if the variant block is too small to click.

    The variants are found at 2:48285642 and 2:48285640-48285641. Note that the two variants overlap: one is a SNP and the other is an indel. SNPs are tagged with ambiguity codes (zoom into the region if you cannot see this). You can find a useful IUPAC ambiguity code guid on the bioinformatics.org website. Single-letter ambiguity codes are given when two or more possible nucleotides may be represented at a single base locus.