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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Griffin, Georgia » Plant Genetic Resources Conservation Unit » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #213761
Title: Mining Genetic Diversity of Sweet Sorghum in the U.S. Collection for Biofuel Production

Author
item Wang, Ming
item Erpelding, John
item JIANMING, YU - KANSAS STATE UNIV
item Pederson, Gary

Submitted to: American Society of Plant Biologists Annual Meeting
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/13/2007
Publication Date: 7/18/2007
Citation: Wang, M.L., Erpelding, J.E., Jianming, Y., Pederson, G.A. 2007. Mining Genetic Diversity of Sweet Sorghum in the U.S. Collection for Biofuel Production [abstract]. American Society of Plant Biologists Annual Meeting. Poster No. P03001, p. 19.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: The sweet sorghum germplasm collection (1280 accessions) is maintained at the Plant Genetic Resources Conservation Unit, Griffin, Georgia. Sweet sorghum contains a high amount of sucrose (2.5% - 13%) that has been used for syrup, molasses, and ethanol production. Furthermore, as a high energy capturing C4 crop, sorghum is well adaptive to many environmental extremes and can easily produce biomass with relatively low inputs. These features make sweet sorghum an ideal crop for biofuel production. However, genetic diversity of the U.S. sweet sorghum collection has never been assessed. Fifty accessions (~5% of the sweet sorghum collection) have been selected and planted in the field. Their sucrose content, brix index and total biomass (converted to gallon of ethanol/per hectare) and other characteristics will be recorded. These accessions will be genetically characterized by a set of 40 DNA markers. We intend to (1) identify accessions with the potential to produce large amount of ethanol per hectare; (2) classify accessions to clusters; (3) select parents to make crosses for generating segregating populations; and (4) optimize future designs of experiments on marker associations with traits contributing to biofuel production.