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Genome sequence shows crop's immense potential
Posted by: Prof. Dr. M. Raupp (IP Logged)
Date: February 03, 2009 05:12PM

By Stephanie Schupska

Southerners may best know sorghum as sweet, biscuit-topping syrup. But the
small grain?s uses range from a dependable, drought-tolerant food crop to
biofuel source, says a University of Georgia researcher.

?Sorghum?s importance is enormous,? said Andrew Paterson, a distinguished
research professor and director of the Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory. PGML
is a joint unit of the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental
Sciences and Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Paterson and his collaborators ? from as close as South Carolina and as far
away as India, Pakistan and Germany ? have mapped and analyzed the genome of
Sorghum bicolor, placing 98 percent of its genes in their chromosomal
context. At 730 million bases, or letters of DNA, sorghum has a genetic code
a quarter the size of the human genome.

The results of the study appear in the Jan. 29 issue of the international
science journal Nature.

Why is this information important?

Drought tolerance makes sorghum important in dry regions like northeast
Africa and the U.S. southern plains. It needs only half the water it takes
to grow corn.

?Not nearly as much has been invested in sorghum as in corn,? Paterson said.
?According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, sorghum
yields increased less than one percent per year over the last 45 years, only
about half the rate of corn, rice and wheat yields. Something is wrong with
this picture. If new information and tools from the sequencing change that,
it?ll improve millions of people?s lives.?

The sorghum that Paterson studied is drought tolerant, but its wild cousins
can survive on even less water and resist more diseases and pests. Breeders
can use the sequence as a tool to blend desirable traits into more improved
commercial plants.

Biofuel potential

The sequenced sorghum genome is also being used to improve biofuel crops
like sugarcane and Miscanthus, a genus of 15 species of perennial grasses
that is a leading biofuel crop in Europe. These plants have much larger and
more complicated genomes than sorghum. A close relative, sorghum can be a
guide to accelerating their improvement.

In the U.S., it?s not clear whether Miscanthus or switchgrass will dominate
the biofuel arena, Paterson said, but recent side-by-side studies show that
Miscanthus out yields switchgrass by as much as three to one.

Sorghum is also used to make biofuel and currently is the No. 2 source of
fuel ethanol in the U.S. Corn is No. 1.

Multiple uses

Production is shifting away from seed-based biofuel to cellulose-based
production, a process for which sorghum also shows great promise. This
shifted prompted the U.S. Department of Energy?s Joint Genome Institute?s
involvement in sorghum sequencing.

The sorghum genome sequence also has other uses. Johnson grass, a crop
related to sorghum, is one of the world?s worst weeds. Paterson hopes that
by using the sequence, researchers can find better ways of controlling the
weed.

A third use of the genome sequence will be to understand the reasons that
sorghum, rice and other cereals are different from one another.

Sorghum is only the second grass genome sequenced. Rice was the first. While
the two grasses are similar ? 93 percent of the genes present in sorghum are
also found in rice ? the differences are important enough to warrant closer
inspection.

The sorghum and rice connection
For example, Paterson?s team discovered that sorghum?s seed protein genes
are completely different than rice seed protein genes. But they don?t know
how and why.

?The genes don?t just stand out and say, ?Here I am. This is why I?m
different from rice,?? Paterson said. ?We have a lot of new questions to
ask.?

He would like to continue to build on his 17 years of sorghum research to
find out what happened to sorghum and rice?s common ancestor millions of
years ago to form the plants that sustain us today.
www.checkbiotech.org



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