Exploiting and Dissecting the Genetics of Bioenergy Sorghums

As interest increases in optimizing selected crops for bioenergy production, sorghum, a drought tolerant C₄ grass, has emerged as a promising model for functional genomics and ideotype breeding. Our long-term goal is to discover and characterize diversity and dissect complex traits associated with carbon partitioning and allocation for sorghum as a sustainable bioenergy crop in the United States.  In this study, we established a panel of approximately 400 diverse accessions exhibiting an extensive range of bioenergy traits, including contrasts in agronomic, compositional, developmental, and phenological traits. Using the approximately 200,000 SNP markers filtered from genotyping-by-sequencing data we conducted genome-wide association scans (GWAS) on over 50 different plant characteristics ranging from agronomic through compositional traits.  Particular attention was paid to the compositional traits where we found multiple putative candidate genes that could hold potential for targeted improvement of sorghum as a high quality biomass crop for the southeast.