Source: CropBiotech Update

Sorghum is one of the world’s most important grain crops, and scientists have been seeking to improve it. The introduction of cold tolerance in sorghum cultivars would be very beneficial, as this trait would allow sorghum to be planted in more places, and in the early spring, when soil moisture is higher. To improve sorghum, scientists need to identify a superior germplasm with cold tolerance.

With this aim, Cleve D. Franks and colleagues of the United States Department of Agriculture conducted “A Comparison of U.S. and Chinese Sorghum Germplasm for Early Season Cold Tolerance,” and report in a recent issue of Crop Science. Their research focused on sorghum lines and hybrids from Chinese landrace accessions of the working group Nervosum-Kaoliang; publicly available inbred lines from the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station sorghum breeding program; and U.S. grain sorghum hybrids provided by seed companies.

Chinese accessions were compared with 10 U.S. inbred parental lines and 10 U.S. commercial hybrids for cold tolerance under laboratory, growth chamber, and field settings. After tests and statistical analysis, scientists found that: 1) Chinese lines were superior to the other lines, in terms of laboratory germination rates and field-based rates of emergence; 2) Chinese lines were not significantly different from hybrid lines in growth chamber assays, except for shoot length, for which the Chinese germplasm was higher; and 3) although Chinese lines had higher germination rates and lower germination temperature thresholds, they had no advantage in terms of biomass production.

Researchers thus concluded that the accessions could serve as a source of genes for cold tolerance during the germination and emergence phase of growth in the breeding of better sorghum lines.

Subscribers to Crop Science can read the complete article at http://crop.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/46/3/1371.