The Gene Pool of Miscanthus Species and Its Improvement
For more than a thousand years, people have used Miscanthus from wild stands or managed landscapes, to feed their livestock, roof their homes, make paper, dye possessions, and beautify their gardens. In recent decades there has been a call to develop Misc
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The Gene Pool of Miscanthus Species and Its Improvement Erik J. Sacks, John A. Juvik, Qi Lin, J. Ryan Stewart, and Toshihiko Yamada
Abstract For more than a thousand years, people have used Miscanthus from wild stands or managed landscapes, to feed their livestock, roof their homes, make paper, dye possessions, and beautify their gardens. In recent decades there has been a call to develop Miscanthus into a fully domesticated biomass crop for sustainable renewable energy needs. Miscanthus is broadly distributed throughout eastern Asia and the Pacific islands, ranging from southern Siberia to tropical Polynesia, with a current center of diversity in temperate northern latitudes. Adaptation to cold and temperate environments is a distinctive feature of Miscanthus relative to other Saccharinae, facilitating its potential to become an important biomass crop in Europe and the USA. Auto- and allopolyploidy have played a role in the evolution of Miscanthus and polyploidy will likely be of central importance for the development and improvement of this crop. Variation for flowering time, including shortday flower induction, will permit plant breeders to optimize local adaptation and biomass-yield of Miscanthus, just as they have done for maize, sorghum and sugarcane. Germplasm collections that are representative of the genus and publicly available need to be established and characterized. Questions of taxonomy, origins, and evolution need attention from the research community. A multidisciplinary approach that includes population genetics, cytogenetics, molecular genetics, and genomics
E.J. Sacks (*) • J.A. Juvik • J.R. Stewart Department of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois, 1101 Institute for Genomic Biology, 1206W. Gregory Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Q. Lin Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China e-mail: [email protected] T. Yamada Field Science Center for Northern Biosphere, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan e-mail: [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_4, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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will be needed to rapidly increase our knowledge of the Miscanthus gene pool, which will facilitate the development of improved cultivars. Keywords Miscanthus • Saccharum • Miscanes • Taxonomy • Centers of origin • Ploidy • Interspecific hybridization • Traditional uses • Breeding
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Singular Properties of the Genus and Its Members
Miscanthus is a perennial, warm-season C4 grass. Some genotypes are highly productive in temperate environments. Depending on environment and genetics, high yields (10–41 dry t ha−1) of cultivated Miscanthus can be achieved with low inputs (Clifton-Brown et al. 2004; Heaton et al. 2004, 2008; Xi 2000). Stands of cultivated Miscanthus can remain productive for more than 10 years (Clifton-Brown and Jones 2001). Thus, over the last 20 years i
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