Genes that impact sorghum grain, sugar, and biomass yield.

The goal of the proposed project is to improve the performance and economic utility of sorghum as a feedstock for ethanol production. High productivity sorghum as an ethanol feedstock will benefit the environment by reducing greenhouse gases and will benefit rural areas of the U.S. by stimulating local production of a high-value crop and associated ethanol refineries. Evolutionary Genomics, Inc. has identified rice genes that adapted during rice domestication. We have shown that these genes have multiple effects on yield and other commercially important traits in rice lines and hybrids. We have identified equivalents of these rice genes native to other Grass family species (corn and barley), and have shown that these genes control yield and other traits in these species as well. Sorghum is a member of the Grass family, so we hypothesize the equivalent genes native to sorghum may control commercially important traits in sorghum, such as yield of grain, sugar, and biomass. We will evaluate the sorghum candidate genes for association with these traits. We will sequence the sorghum candidate genes in a panel of 200 sorghum lines, and perform allelic association analysis to detect trait associations. If successful, these genes should be excellent tools for breeding higher yielding sorghum and for genetically engineering sorghum using natural or derived alleles of genes that are native to sorghum, which should be more environmentally acceptable than genetically modified plants involving foreign genes.