In Nature, a team led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and DOE Joint Genome Institute has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome. Building off this work, researchers at all four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers—the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, the Center for Advanced Bioenergy & Bioproducts Institute, and the Joint BioEnergy Institute—have expanded the network of common gardens and are exploring improvements to switchgrass through more targeted genome editing techniques to customize the crop for additional end products. Read more here on the JGI website.
