Bioinformatic Tools for Polyploid Crops

Polyploidy is common among agriculturally important crops. Popular genetic methods and their implementations cannot always be applied to polyploid genetic data. We give an overview about available tools and their limitations in terms of levels of ploidy, auto- and allo-ploidy. The main classes of tools are genotype calling, linkage mapping and haplotyping. The usability of the tools is discussed with a focus on their applicability to data sets produced by state of the art technologies. We show that many challenges remain until the toolset for polyploidy provides similar functionalities as those which are already available for diploids. Some tools have been developed over a decade ago and are now outdated. In addition, we discuss necessary steps to overcome this shortage in the future.