Advancing Sorghum Through Genetics and Genomic Innovation

• Cereal: Sorghum
• Abiotic Stressor: Drought
• Principal Investigator: Tesfaye Mengiste, Purdue University

Improving sorghum performance under drought conditions requires a deeper understanding of the genetic and physiological mechanisms that enable plants to maintain growth and yield under water limitation. Drought remains a primary constraint to sorghum production across Ethiopia, affecting a majority of production environments and contributing to persistent yield instability. This effort builds on a well-characterized core collection of Ethiopian sorghum landraces, supported by whole-genome sequencing and extensive phenotypic data, to identify genes and alleles associated with drought tolerance.

The project integrates field-based and controlled-environment phenotyping to measure key drought-related traits, including water-use efficiency, transpiration efficiency, root architecture, osmotic adjustment, and recovery from stress. These datasets are combined with high-density genomic data to enable genome-wide association studies (GWAS), QTL mapping, and transcriptome analyses for gene discovery and validation. Multiple complementary approaches—including genetic mapping populations, bulked segregant analysis, and gene network analysis—are used to define loci and candidate genes contributing to distinct drought tolerance mechanisms.

Key outputs include validated drought tolerance genes and alleles, molecular markers for trait selection, and characterized germplasm that can be used in pre-breeding efforts. These resources establish a foundation for genomics-enabled breeding by supporting allele discovery, validation, and integration into breeding pipelines. In parallel, the project strengthens capacity in phenotyping, genomics, and data analysis, ensuring that these tools and datasets can be applied to accelerate progress in drought tolerance research and sorghum improvement.