Project Overview

We are reducing the bottleneck of translating findings from rice into sorghum, by improving its genetic transformation pipeline and unlocking its potential as a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) platform.

Sorghum is an important cereal and has been identified by the DOE as a flagship biomass crop. Sorghum is notable for its high productivity on marginal land, even under increasingly climate-driven conditions such as low nitrogen and low water availability. Importantly, sorghum can have a deep root system (>2 m) that our work demonstrates is critical to the long-lived sequestration of soil organic carbon. Pioneering work from our team has demonstrated efficient transformation; however, although genome editing of sorghum is possible, current low efficiencies are a barrier to our engineering approaches. We are building on our foundational work by applying new technical advances from IGI researchers to develop high-efficiency genome editing protocols for sorghum.

Read more:

• “The Crop of the Future”: Why Climate Scientists Are Sweet on Sorghum
• IGI’s overall work on using CRISPR for carbon removal.