Rutwik Barmukh

This chapter offers a thorough examination of sorghum breeding in Asia, covering its history, distribution, and domestication. It addresses challenges in breeding, particularly cytoplasmic male sterility, and extensively explores the application of omics approaches such as transcriptomics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics. Emphasis is placed on climate resilience, utilizing genomics to develop sorghum varieties adapted to biotic and abiotic stresses. We summarized biotic and abiotic stresses, along with biotechnological interventions to enhance important agronomic traits. This chapter also delves into modifying flowering, plant height, and the brown midrib structure’s implications for animal feed. Throughout, the significance of these tools and techniques in understanding sorghum genetics and aiding breeding programs is highlighted. In conclusion, we discussed addressing current challenges in sorghum breeding in Asia and advocating ongoing research and collaboration to ensure regional food security and sustainable agriculture. Overall, it provides a comprehensive, up-to-date account of sorghum breeding, showcasing genomics and biotechnology’s pivotal role in enhancing resilience and productivity.

The rapid growth in the human population and increasing environmental fluctuations have created a pressing necessity to develop crops that exhibit greater yields and heightened resilience to climate change. Genome editing mediated by Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein (Cas), hold the potential in addressing these challenges by enabling targeted modifications in the crop genomes, thereby creating novel variations and expediting breeding efforts. The use of genome editing for improving crops is not restricted by narrow genomic diversity or the necessity for multiple breeding generations to select desired alleles. However, the deployment of this technology for editing crop genomes face limitations due to the absence of complete, high-quality reference genomes, limited understanding of possible editing targets, and a lack of functional assays to assess the effect of specific gene edits. To overcome these obstacles, advancements in next-generation sequencing are being utilized at different stages of the genome editing process. These techniques enable the analysis of CRISPR off-target effects, confirmation of gene knockouts, and validation of additional edits. Various high-throughput sequencing methods are presently employed to evaluate the influence of CRISPR/Cas-mediated genome edits on the structure and functionality of genes. When integrated with precise phenotyping and functional genomic studies, genomics is providing novel foundations for designing future crops using genome editing.