Back to Home

Sequencing the Sorghum Genome

We also participated in a consortium to sequence the sorghum genome. The sequenced cultivar was BTx623, which is grain sorghum. Grain sorghum like maize is used as animal feed, but it can grow on marginal land and uses less water and fertilizer than maize. Another type of sorghum is called sweet sorghum because it accumulates like sugarcane soluble sugars in the stem. Sweet sorghum provides an alternative to sugarcane, which is a close relative, as a biofuel crops because of its preferable traits, a simple diploid genome, and standard genetic system, whereas sugarcane has an allopolyploid genome and requires a long time for standard breeding. We therefore have investigated which differentially expressed genes are linked to the stem-sweetness phenotype of sorghum. To understand the regulation of those differentially expressed genes, we have investigated the small RNA transcriptome in the F2 of crosses between grain and sweet sorghum and their parents.

Publications

  • Paterson, A.H., Bowers, J.E., Bruggmann, R., Dubchak, I., Grimwood, J., Gundlach, H., Haberer, G., Hellsten, U., Mitros, T., Poliakov, A., Schmutz, J., Spannagl, M., Tang, H., Wang, X., Wicker, T., Bharti, A.K., Chapman, J., Feltus, F.A., Gowik, U., Lyons, E., Maher, C., Martis, M., Narechania, A., Penning, B., Wang, Y., Zhang, L., Carpita, N.C., Freeling, M., Gingle, A.R., Hash, C.T., Keller, B., Klein, P., Kresovich, S., McCann, M.C., Ming, R., Peterson, D.G., ur-Rahman, M., Ware, D., Westhoff, P., Mayer, K.F.X., Messing. J., and Rokhsar, D.S. (2009) The Sorghum bicolor genome and the diversification of grasses. Nature 457, 551-556.
  • Messing, J. (2009). Synergy of two reference genomes for the grass family. Plant Physiol. 149, 1-8.
  • Calvino, M., Mihai Miclaus, Bruggmann, R., and Messing, J. (2009). Molecular markers for sweet sorghum based on microarray expression data. Rice 2, 129-142.
  • Calvino, M., Bruggmann, R., and Messing, J. (2011). Characterization of the small RNA component of the transcriptome from grain and sweet sorghum stems. BMC Genomics 12, e356.
  • Liao, J.C. and Messing J. (2012) Energy Biotechnology. Curr. Opin. Biotechnol. 23, 287-289.
  • Calviño, M. and Messing, J. (2012). Sweet sorghum as a model system for bioenergy crops. Curr. Opin. Biotechnol. 23, 323-329–7.
  • Calviño, M. and Messing, J. (2013). Discovery of microRNA169 gene copies in genomes of flowering plants through positional information. Genome Biol Evolut 5, 402-417.