Single nucleotide polymorphism isolated from a novel EST dataset in garden asparagus (Asparagus officinalis L.)

► Pyro-sequencing has been used to sequence transcriptome from garden asparagus. ► A pipeline has been used to predict SNPs and SSR sequences in asparagus. ► Gene Ontology annotation assignments for all uniscripts/genes functions has been adopted. ► Over 1800 putative SNPs and 1000 SSRs were detected from the assembled uniscripts. ► 144 SNPs together with 60 SSRs were utilized for mapping in a segregant population. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and simple sequence repeats (SSR) are abundant and evenly distributed co-dominant molecular markers in plant genomes. SSRs are valuable for marker assisted breeding and positional cloning of genes associated traits of interest. Although several high throughput platforms have been developed to identify SNP and SSR markers for analysis of segregant plant populations, breeding in garden asparagus (Asparagus officinalis L.) has been limited by a low content of such markers. In this study massively parallel GS-FLX pyro-sequencing technology (454 Life Sciences) has been used to sequence and compare transcriptome from two genotypes: a rust tolerant male (1770) and a susceptible female (G190). A total of 122,963 and 99,368 sequence reads, with an average length of 245.7bp, have been recovered from accessions 1770 and 190 respectively. A computational pipeline has been used to predict and visually inspect putative SNPs and SSR sequences. Analysis of Gene Ontology (GO) slim annotation assignments for all assembled uniscripts indicated that the 24,403 assemblies represent genes from a broad array of functions. Further, over 1800 putative SNPs and 1000 SSRs were detected. One hundred forty-four SNPs together with 60 selected SSRs were validated and used to develop a preliminary genetic map by using a large BC1 population, derived from 1770 and G190. The abundance of SNPs and SSRs provides a foundation for the development of saturated genetic maps and their utilization in assisted asparagus breeding programs.