Within its genome, Sorghum bicolor holds keys to drought and flood resilience, biomass production for fuels, and growth in poor soils. In addition to bolstering sorghum fields, understanding this plant eventually offers avenues for translating its strengths into other crops for biofuels and bioproducts.

Historically, work on sorghum has focused on producing high-quality reference genomes. By cataloguing a genome sequence for a line of sorghum, reference genomes have generated insight into drought tolerance, biomass production and more — however, a single reference genome shows only one slice of the adaptation possible for this plant. In other lines around the world, much more genetic diversity exists. 

Now, researchers have brought many reference genomes and sequences together at once, producing a pangenome resource for sorghum, recently reported in Nature. Read more on the JGI website.