Whole Genome Resequencing of Sorghum Provides Insights for Crop Improvement

A paper published in Nature presents the resequencing of the sorghum genome, providing insights for the improvement of plant agroecological characteristics.

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. (Moench)) is the world's fifth economically most important cereal and is a staple in the semi-arid tropics of Africa and Asia. Sorghum has gained popularity due to the rise in demand for gluten-free specialty grains rich in health-promoting and food oxidative stabilizing compounds.

Sorghum's genome sequence was first released in 2009, reporting more than 34,000 annotated genes. The current work of researchers from India, Turkey, and South Korea has whole-genome resequenced and presents the comparative information of S. bicolor and S. bicolor × S. halepense recombinant inbred lines. The researchers evaluated 172 sorghum lines from two different populations of 153 S. bicolor and 19 S. bicolor × S. halepense. A total of 21.70 billion and 3,25 trillion of clean paired-end reads and bases were produced, respectively. The resequencing work also identified a large set of polymorphisms, consisting of 665,378,447 high-quality variants which is the first whole genome map of SNPs, indels, SVs, and CNVs in a sorghum panel that includes S. halepense genome. This can be used in future research in functional genomics and genome-assisted breeding.

For more details, read the open-access paper in Nature Scientific Reports.