Nuclear DNA segments homologous to mitochondrial DNA are obstacles for detecting heteroplasmy in sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.)

Heteroplasmy, the coexistence of multiple mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences in a cell, is well documented in plants. Next-generation sequencing technology (NGS) has made it feasible to sequence entire genomes. Thus, NGS has the potential to detect heteroplasmy; however, the methods and pitfalls in heteroplasmy detection have not been fully investigated and identified. One obstacle for heteroplasmy detection is the sequence homology between mitochondrial-, plastid-, and nuclear DNA, of which the influence of nuclear DNA segments homologous to mtDNA (numt) need to be minimized. To detect heteroplasmy, we first excluded nuclear DNA sequences of sugar beet (Beta vulgaris) line EL10 from the sugar beet mtDNA sequence. NGS reads were obtained from single plants of sugar beet lines NK-195BRmm-O and NK-291BRmm-O and mapped to the unexcluded mtDNA regions. More than 1000 sites exhibited intra-individual polymorphism as detected by genome browsing analysis. We focused on a 309-bp region where 12 intra-individual polymorphic sites were closely linked to each other. Although the existence of DNA molecules having variant alleles at the 12 sites was confirmed by PCR amplification from NK-195BRmm-O and NK-291BRmm-O, these variants were not always called by six variant-calling programs, suggesting that these programs are inappropriate for intra-individual polymorphism detection. When we changed the nuclear DNA reference, a numt absent from EL10 was found to include the 309-bp region. Genetic segregation of an F(2) population from NK-195BRmm-O x NK-291BRmm-O supported the numt origin of the variant alleles. Using four references, we found that numt detection exhibited reference dependency, and extreme polymorphism of numts exists among sugar beet lines. One of the identified numts absent from EL10 is also associated with another intra-individual polymorphic site in NK-195mm-O. Our data suggest that polymorphism among numts is unexpectedly high within sugar beets, leading to confusion about the true degree of heteroplasmy.