Genomic Resources and 3D Phenotyping to Accelerate Sorghum Improvement

The development of genomic and phenomic resources will accelerate the genetic improvement of the food, forage, and bioenergy crop plant Sorghum bicolor. In collaboration with the DOE Joint Genome Institute and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, a suite of improved genomic resources for sorghum were generated, including a more accurate genome assembly (Sbi3), transcriptome annotation (v3.1), and atlas of transcript expression across multiple sorghum tissues and developmental stages. Genomic resources combined with high throughput, image-based phenotyping platforms are able to rapidly identify genetic bases of complex traits useful for plant performance. We developed a portable phenotyping platform based on a depth camera to semi-automatically generate and automatically measure 3D reconstructions of sorghum plants. This platform identified quantitative trait loci (QTL) underlying phenotypic variation in shoot architecture across multiple developmental timepoints, including QTL for plant height and leaf length. These results show that sorghum Dwarf-3 (Dw3) is associated with a pleiotropic effect on leaf angle at least 7 days prior to an effect on plant height. Continued development of these and additional genomic and phenomic resources for sorghum will facilitate more rapid advances in plant productivity.