A unified VCF dataset from nearly 1,500 diverse maize accessions and resources to explore the genomic landscape of maize

Efforts to capture and analyze maize nucleotide diversity have ranged widely in scope, but differences in reference genome version and software algorithms used in these efforts inhibit comparison, and these data are generally not available in an easy-to-use visualization platform for quick access and analysis. To address these issues, The Maize Genetics and Genomics Database has collaborated with maize researchers to offer variant data from a diverse set of 1,498 inbred lines, traditional varieties, and teosintes through a standardized variant-calling pipeline against version 5 of the B73 reference genome. The output was filtered for mapping quality, completeness, and linkage disequilibrium, and annotated based on variant effects relative to the B73 RefGen_v5 gene annotations. MaizeGDB has also updated a web tool, SNPversity 2.0, to filter, visualize, and download genotype sets based on genomic locations and accessions of interest, and added external datasets to demonstrate SNPversity 2.0's broad usage. MaizeGDB plans to host annual updates of these resources as additional resequencing data become available, with plans to expand to all publicly available sequence data.