Abstract

Genomic resources for sorghum have grown rapidly in the last 20 years with the development of plant genomics technologies. However, the regulatory mechanisms of many important agronomic traits in sorghum remain unknown. The availability of a large mutant population is an important genetic resource for functional genomic studies . In this seminar, a large sequence-index sorghum mutant population will be presented. We have established Pedigreed Mutant Library in the sorghum inbred line BTx623 by mutagenizing the seeds with ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS). This library has 6,400 M4 seed pools and possesses a great diversity of mutant phenotypes. Our sequencing effort identified mutations in 97% of sorghum genes to support the gene function study. Furthermore, we have established an effective bioinformatic pipeline to identify the causal mutations through bulk-segregant-analysis (BSA) of the whole genome sequencing data of the pooled mutants selected from F2 populations. The sorghum mutant library will be a useful resource for create new traits for breeding and promising targets for genome editing.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Yinping Jiao is an Assistant Professor at the department of Plant and Soil Science, Texas Tech University since 2020. Her research group investigates the genetic diversity and regulatory mechanisms of important agronomical traits in sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), with the goal of facilitating breeding. Before joining Texas Tech, she did postdocs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and USDA-ARS working on maize (Zea mays) and sorghum functional genomics. During this time, she was involved in the construction of a high-quality maize reference genome using single-molecule technologies. She did her PhD in Plant Genetics and Breeding at China Agriculture University, investigating genetic diversity in maize populations.