Jing Haichun
Institute of Botany, Key Laboratory of Plant Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Sweet sorghum (Sorghum bicolour) is a natural variant of the common grain sorghum with distinct features including taller plant, higher biomass production and stress tolerance, and sugar- and juice-rich stem. Because of such traits, sweet sorghum has been regarded as one of the best candidates for biofuel crops, particularly in China where the biofuel production is required not to compete for land with food crops. However, little is known about the genetic control of these biofuel-associated traits. The rapid advance in Next-Generation Sequencing technologies has revolutionised the way of exploring genetic diversity, dissecting genomic variation and discovery of novel alleles for genetic improvement of crop plants. During the forum, I will report our current researches on the (1) de novo assembly of a sweet sorghum genome, (2) exploring genome variation using public available data, (3) analysis of presence and absence variants (PAVs) in sorghum genomes. The use of the genomic variation for establishing trait – gene associations will be discussed.
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