Associate Professor Metropolitan State University Saint Paul, Minnesota
Body of Abstract: The accurate detection of induced mutations in population-scale forward genetics studies can be hampered by unintended experimental errors which impact the effectiveness of variant-calling algorithms. We implemented a very fast and efficient DNA mutation clustering software (Volvox_scan) for detecting related mutants, retrieving and cataloging likely false-negative shared variants, and exposing problematic samples in a sequenced population. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the clustering software in the analysis of variants from three previous large-scale sequencing projects. This freely available and flexible standalone software is platform-independent and has been successfully tested on Windows, Linux and Mac systems.