Synthesis: Fundamental Insights and Practical Applications from the Saccharinae Clade
The Saccharinae clade offers both opportunities to improve the efficiency and sustainability at which we convert solar energy and other resources into food, feed, fiber, and fuel and to gain new insights into the ecology, evolution, and function of plant
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Synthesis: Fundamental Insights and Practical Applications from the Saccharinae Clade Andrew H. Paterson
Abstract The Saccharinae clade offers both opportunities to improve the efficiency and sustainability at which we convert solar energy and other resources into food, feed, fiber, and fuel and to gain new insights into the ecology, evolution, and function of plant species, their genomes, and their constituent genes. Singular features of biogeography, productivity, and stress tolerance of key Saccharinae taxa fit particularly well with existing or anticipated needs of agriculture. Sorghum holds particular promise as a botanical model for the clade, albeit with more complex genomes in the clade also offering intriguing opportunities to clarify roles of polyploidy in agricultural productivity and post-polyploidy evolution. Keywords Sorghum • Saccharum • Miscanthus • Karyotype evolution • Carbon assimilation • Drought • Perenniality • Weediness • Invasiveness
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Background
The Saccharinae, as circumscribed by Kellogg (Chap. 1, this volume), has a rich history of contributions to humanity with the promise of still-greater contributions as a result of recent invigorated interest and research activity in several members of this group. Both sorghum (Kimber et al., Chap. 2) and Saccharum (Paterson et al., Chap. 3) appear to have been of importance even to prehistoric peoples. Scientific improvement through prudent engagement of conventional approaches and genetic engineering (Tejinder et al., Chap. 10; Beyene et al., Chap. 11) now offer the potential to transcend the limits of natural variation in enhancing the productivity, quality, A.H. Paterson (*) Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory, Departments of Crop and Soil Science, Plant Biology, and Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
A.H. Paterson (ed.), Genomics of the Saccharinae, Plant Genetics and Genomics: Crops and Models 11, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5947-8_23, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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and sustainability of conventional economic products from these plants, and further to harness these plants as cost-effective biofactories for production of novel highvalue products. Miscanthus, although less familiar as a crop and indeed arguably not yet domesticated, also has a long history of human utilization (Sacks et al., Chap. 4), with recent interest in its tremendous biomass productivity motivating the development of tools and technologies to expedite its improvement (e.g., Engler et al., Chap. 12). Parallels in gene repertoire, organization, and function among these taxa (Paterson et al., Chap. 18) suggest that knowledge of the composition (Vermerris, Chap. 17; Murray, Chap. 20), agronomy (Jessup, Chap. 21), pathology (Magill, Chap. 15), and entomology (Huang et al, Chap. 16) of one or more of the Saccharinae crops may “translate” well to other members of the group, conferring synergies in the parallel improvement of these taxa. By way of summary and synthesis, here I sugg
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