Sugarcane produces 80 percent of the world’s sugar, which is of interest to bioenergy researchers who want to develop sustainable alternative fuels. Improving sugarcane breeding methods using molecular biology techniques has been hampered by the crop’s highly polyploid genome, which makes sequencing and assembly of the genome extremely challenging. As part of a proposal by JBEI, the JGI was part of an international team led by researchers from the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), who worked on sequencing and assembling fragments of sugarcane chromosomes into the first monoploid reference of the gene-rich part of the sugarcane genome. Reported in Nature Communications, their approach relied in part on having a sequence for sugarcane’s relative sorghum, a JGI Plant Flagship Genome sequence, and knowing that there was a high level of colinearity between the two crops, which meant most genes in sorghum occurred roughly in the same order in sugarcane. Learn more on the JGI website.

Terpenes play key roles in plant growth, defense, and environmental interactions. Terpenes are also economically important because of their use in industrial materials, pharmaceutical products, and as biofuel precursors. Collectively, hundreds of terpene compounds have been characterized from eucalypts, a group of 900 tree species belonging to the Myrtaceae (myrtle) family and containing the closely-related genera Angophora, Corymbia and Eucalyptus. As part of a proposal by the DOE’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), the JGI worked on resequencing several eucalypt genomes to establish the feasibility of genome wide association studies for genetic traits that are desirable from a biofuels production perspective. By using genomic database alignment tools, researchers searched for TPS genes in the eucalypt Corymbia citriodora. Learn more on the JGI website.