Efficiency of EUChip60K pipeline in fingerprinting clonal population of Eucalyptus globulus

EUChip60K is a good option to evaluate clonal identity in a breeding population of E. globulus. Breeding populations normally are composed of numerous progenies which become the base for the development of new genetic material for propagation and to advance generations of breeding. Errors in clonal identity could have a great impact on expected gain from the breeding programs. In most breeding programs, a moderate percentage of genetic material is often mislabeled. Molecular markers, such as microsatellites, are being currently used to detect such errors. These markers have been demonstrated to be efficient and low cost for massive analysis of samples in a forest breeding program. However, they have a very low transferability across laboratories and the analysis can be time consuming. In this study, we show the high reproducibility level for genotyping Eucalyptus globulus clones and demonstrate the high ability to identify errors between clones using the EUChip60K, a SNP panel with around 60K SNP markers. Even though EUChip60K is a multi-species array for Eucalyptus, it could be easily applied to an E. globulus clonal program. This is the first case of study to assess the EUChip60K performance to evaluate identity errors in a clonal population of E. globulus.