Rapid fine mapping of causative mutations from sets of unordered, contig-sized fragments of genome sequence

BACKGROUND: Traditional Map based Cloning approaches, used for the identification of desirable alleles, are extremely labour intensive and years can elapse between the mutagenesis and the detection of the polymorphism. High throughput sequencing based Mapping-by-sequencing approach requires an ordered genome assembly and cannot be used with fragmented, un-scaffolded draft genomes, limiting its application to model species and precluding many important organisms. RESULTS: We addressed this gap in resource and presented a computational method and software implementations called CHERIPIC (Computing Homozygosity Enriched Regions In genomes to Prioritise Identification of Candidate variants). We have successfully validated implementation of CHERIPIC using three different types of bulk segregant sequence data from Arabidopsis, maize and barley, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: CHERIPIC allows users to rapidly analyse bulk segregant sequence data and we have made it available as a pre-packaged binary with all dependencies for Linux and MacOS and as Galaxy tool. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-018-2515-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.