TILLING (Targeted Induced Local Lesions in Genomes) is a powerful technique that can identify a series of allelic mutations or SNPs in a target gene by heteroduplex analysis (Till BJ, et al. 2003, Genome Res. 13:524-530; Gilchrist and Haughn, 2005; Gilchrist and Haughn 2006; Gilchrist and Haughn, 2010; Gilchrist and Haughn, 2013). It can be adapted for use in a high-throughput facility, and has been successfully applied to many plants and animals. Beginning in 2002 we established a TILLING facility, CAN-TILL (http://www.botany.ubc.ca/can-till/) at UBC. We have developed a TILLING service in Canada that will be able to identify mutations in genes from a wide variety of different organisms. To date we have successfully TILLED in Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans (Gilchrist et al., 2006B), Brassica oleracea (Himelblau et al., 2009) and Brassica napus (Gilchrist et al., 2013). We have also used TILLING to look at natural variation in Populus trichocarpa (known as EcoTILLING; Gilchrist et al., 2006A). We are always in search of partners to develop TILLING populations in other organisms.
