From Sequence to Consequence: Exploring and Exploiting Diversity Deserts and Hot-Spots in Sorghum Whole Genome Sequences

Amongst the cereals, sorghum is one of the best adapted to drought and high temperatures. It is likely that sorghum will play an increasingly important role in meeting the challenges arising from feeding a growing population in the face of likely negative impacts of climate change combined with dwindling soil and water resources for agricultural production. Resequencing data across a set of 44 sorghum genotypes, spanning modern breeding lines, landraces, wild, and weedy accessions, offer opportunities to investigate diversity deserts and hot-spots in the sorghum genome and to explore the genomic consequences of crop domestication and improvement where, uniquely, a cereal and its wild relatives continue to coexist and interbreed over a broad geographic range. In particular, the resequencing data have demonstrated that modern sorghum cultivars sample only a small proportion of the primary gene pool and an untapped resource of diversity exists in landraces, weedy relatives and the Asian endemic species S. propinquum. This presentation will detail how these assembled genomes are being used to navigate and exploit this diversity in sorghum, and also how they can provide researchers working on other cereal crops with a key resource for comparative genomics and trait dissection.