DOE awards $13.5 million for sorghum genetics research project

December 21, 2015 |

In Missouri, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center announced that it will be part of a major collaborative research project to improve sorghum’s productivity under resource-limited conditions. The research should lead to strategies to increase plant biomass as well as more water use- and nutrient-efficient sorghum crop systems. The five- year $13.5M project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and will be led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Using a systems approach researchers will investigate sorghum genetics as well as the soil microbes that interact with plants. The work takes advantage of advances in marker-assisted breeding, metagenomics and computational genomic analysis. Geneticists will search for and study sorghum varieties that use water and nitrogen more efficiently under limited water or nitrogen conditions. At the same time, microbiologists will identify and characterize soil microbes that interact with and benefit sorghum, such as by enhancing nutrient uptake, water-use efficiency and disease protection.

Category: Research

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