Plant & Animal Genomes XV Conference

January 13-17, 2007
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Exploring Genetic Diversity In Sorghum

Jean-Francois Rami¹ , Lucio Alencar^1,2 , Sophie Bouchet¹ , Claire Billot¹ , Monique Deu¹ , C Tom Hash⁵ , Yu Li⁴ , Andrzej Kilian³ , Brigitte Courtois¹ , Jean-Christophe Glaszmann¹

¹  Cirad, UMR 1096, TA 40/03, Avenue Agropolis, Montpellier, F-34398 France

²  Universidade Catolica de Brasilia, SGAN 916, Mod. B. Asa Norte, Brasilia, DF, Brazil, 70790-160

³  DArT PL 1 Wilf Crane Crescent, Yarralumla, ACT 2600, Australia

⁴  Institute of Crop Science, CAAS, 12 Zhongguancun South street, Beijing 100081, China

⁵  ICRISAT, Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh 502 324, India

The Generation Challenge Programme aims at making the most of sources of genetic diversity maintained in world collections and breeding programs to identify and use genes and superior alleles for key agricultural traits, especially drought tolerance. In sorghum, a composite collection of about 3400 accessions has been characterized with 42 microsatellites through a collaborative effort associating ICRISAT, Agropolis-CIRAD and CAAS. The resulting dataset provide a basis for the exploration of genetic diversity at different scales. High throughput marker systems such as DArT are being used for whole genome profiling and reveal their efficiency in linkage disequilibrium analysis and for further whole genome association scans. This presentation also emphasizes results on analysis of allelic diversity of known genes and its comparison with pangenomic diversity which gives different pictures of the structure of sorghum genetic diversity.