Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference

January 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Sequencing Of The Sorghum Genome

Andrew H. Paterson¹ , John E. Bowers¹ , Alan R. Gingle¹ , Daniel G. Peterson⁵ , Stephen E. Kresovich³ , Joachim Messing⁴ , C.Thomas Hash² , Daniel S. Rokhsar⁶

¹  Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory; Univ. Georgia, Athens GA

²  International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Patancheru, India.

³  Institute for Genomic Diversity, and Inst. For Biotech. & Life Sci. Tech., Cornell University, Ithaca NY

⁴  Waksman Institute and Plant Genome Initiative, Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ

⁵  Mississippi Genome Exploration Laboratory, Mississippi State University, Starkville MS

⁶  DoE Joint Genome Institute and Department of Physics, University of California Berkeley, CA.

Sequencing of the ~736 Mb genome of sorghum (Sorghum spp.), a higher plant that is one of the world’s leading grain crops, has begun. As a model for the tropical grasses, sorghum is a logical complement to the temperate grass Oryza (rice), the first monocot plant to be sequenced. In addition to its intrinsic value, the sorghum sequence will be a valuable reference for assembling and analyzing the 4x larger genome of maize. Sorghum is an even closer relative of sugarcane, arguably the most important biomass/biofuels crop worldwide. The Sorghum genus is also noteworthy in that it includes one of the world’s most noxious weeds, ‘Johnson grass’ (S. halepense). Therefore, sorghum offers novel learning opportunities relevant to weed biology as well as to improvement of a wide range of other forage, turf, and biomass crops. The sorghum sequence, slated for completion in 2006, will comprise 4X sequence coverage in paired-end sequences from each of two S. bicolor plasmid libraries (3 kb and 8 kb inserts, respectively), and 15X clone coverage from one fosmid library (36 kb). This shotgun data will be combined with paired-end sequences from sorghum BACs, as well as other publicly available sorghum sequences and assembled into contigs (contiguous sequences without gaps) and scaffolds (reconstructed stretches of sequence that may contain gaps). Integration of the scaffolds with markers on high-density sequence-tagged-site–based physical and genetic maps (BOWERS et al. 2003, 2005) are expected to permit the assembly of genetically-oriented pseudomolecules that substantially cover most chromosomes.