Mitigating Abiotic Stress Through the Application of Genomic and Breeding Strategies in Sorghum

Resistance to environmental stress, as well as enhanced yield performance and stability, and grain and stem qualities, has been improved in sorghum to be used as food, feed, and biomass for energy production. Transcriptome research on sorghum response to drought stress, temperature extremes, salinity, and heavy metals revealed the enrichment of core genes involved in basic and critical functions (such as reproductive development, leaf and seed development, cell differentiation, and chloroplast organization), as well as in dispensable genes involved in adaptive biological processes (such as secondary metabolic processes, RNA processing, and amino acid transport). The powerful approaches to uncover the complex traits of abiotic stress responses using genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers are genome-wide association study (GWAS), quantitative trait loci (QTLs) mapping, and genomic selection (GS). In addition, the comparative genomics analysis is adopted to explore the genomic variation between sweet and grain sorghums. The genome-editing technologies and the mutant libraries provide efficient resources to identify mutations allowing the rapid introduction into elite germplasm. The development of next generation and third-generation sequencing technologies as well as high-throughput phenomics will allow more effective exploitation of large-scale breeding populations.