Mitigating Abiotic Stress Through the Application of Genomic and Breeding Strategies in Sorghum

Resistance to environmental stress, as well as enhanced yield performance and\r\nstability, and grain and stem qualities, has been improved in sorghum to be\r\nused as food, feed, and biomass for energy production. Transcriptome research\r\non sorghum response to drought stress, temperature extremes, salinity, and\r\nheavy metals revealed the enrichment of core genes involved in basic and critical\r\nfunctions (such as reproductive development, leaf and seed development,\r\ncell differentiation, and chloroplast organization), as well as in dispensable\r\ngenes involved in adaptive biological processes (such as secondary metabolic\r\nprocesses, RNA processing, and amino acid transport). The powerful\r\napproaches to uncover the complex traits of abiotic stress responses using\r\ngenome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers are genomewide\r\nassociation study (GWAS), quantitative trait loci (QTLs) mapping, and\r\ngenomic selection (GS). In addition, the comparative genomics analysis is\r\nadopted to explore the genomic variation between sweet and grain sorghums.\r\nThe genome-editing technologies and the mutant libraries provide efficient\r\nresources to identify mutations allowing the rapid introduction into elite germplasm.\r\nThe development of next generation and third-generation sequencing\r\ntechnologies as well as high-throughput phenomics will allow more effective\r\nexploitation of large-scale breeding populations.