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ARS Home » Plains Area » Lubbock, Texas » Cropping Systems Research Laboratory » Plant Stress and Germplasm Development Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #383954
Research Project: Discovery and Improvement of Traits to Enhance Sorghum as a Multiple Purpose Crop

Location: Plant Stress and Germplasm Development Research

Title: Sorghum genetic, genomic, and breeding resources

Author
item Xin, Zhanguo
item Wang, Ming
item Cuevas, Hugo
item Chen, Junping
item Harrison, Melanie
item Pugh, Nicholas - Ace
item MORRIS, GEOFFREY - Colorado State University

Submitted to: Planta
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/28/2021
Publication Date: 11/5/2021
Citation: Xin, Z., Wang, M.L., Chen, J., Harrison, M.L., Morris, G., Cuevas, H.E., Pugh, N.A. 2021. Sorghum genetic, genomic, and breeding resources. Planta. 114:254. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-021-03742-w.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-021-03742-w

Interpretive Summary: Sorghum is an annual tropical C4 grass and one of the first domesticated cereal crops. It is grown across a wide range of environments and serves as an important source of food, fodder, fiber, fuel, and building materials. Over the past 2 decades, a number of community resources have been established including a sequenced and assembled genome making sorghum a model for C4 crops. In addition to the sequence reference genome, there exists a vast collection of diverse sorghum growth types and other molecular tools for breeding key traits such for environmental stress tolerance and improved food and bioenergy production. This paper describes the current publicly available genetic tools and online resources for sorghum breeding and genomic studies. These valuable resources will catapult sorghum research to the forefront of grain crops research and provide valuable insight for improving other major crops, such as rice and maize as well as serving as model for lesser known C4 grasses.

Technical Abstract: As a stress resilient C4 plant, sorghum is a major crop for food production in semi-arid and arid regions. Recently, it has been used as a primary feedstock for forage and bioenergy production. Due to the increasing importance of sorghum in agriculture production, many community resources have been established. These resources include vast collection of germplasm, high quality reference genomic sequences, sorghum association panels for genome-wide association study of traits related with food and bioenergy production, mutant populations for fast discovery of causative genes for traits relevant to sorghum improvement, and online sorghumbase that integrates all resources to provide sorghum community tools for breeding and genomic studies. These valuable resources will catapult sorghum research rival with other major crops, such as rice and maize.