RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Linkage analysis and haplotype phasing in experimental autopolyploid populations with high ploidy level using hidden Markov models JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 415232 DO 10.1101/415232 A1 Marcelo Mollinari A1 Antonio Augusto Franco Garcia YR 2018 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/27/415232.abstract AB Modern SNP genotyping technologies allow to measure the relative abundance of different alleles for a given locus and consequently to estimate their allele dosage, opening a new road for genetic studies in autopolyploids. Despite advances in genetic linkage analysis in autotetraploids, there is a lack of statistical models to perform linkage analysis in organisms with higher ploidy levels. In this paper, we present a statistical method to estimate recombination fractions and infer linkage phases in full-sib populations of autopolyploid species with even ploidy levels in a sequence of SNP markers using hidden Markov models. Our method uses efficient two-point procedures to reduce the search space for the best linkage phase configuration and reestimate the final parameters using the maximum-likelihood of the Markov chain. To evaluate the method, and demonstrate its properties, we rely on simulations of autotetraploid, autohexaploid and autooctaploid populations and on a real tetraploid potato data set. The results demonstrate the reliability of our approach, including situations with complex linkage phase scenarios in hexaploid and octaploid populations.Author summary In this paper, we present a complete multilocus solution based on hidden Markov models to estimate recombination fractions and infer the linkage phase configuration in full-sib mapping populations with even ploidy levels under random chromosome segregation. We also present an efficient pairwise loci analysis to be used in cases were the multilocus analysis becomes compute-intensive.