Improving Breeding Methods to Enhance Productivity of Sorghum

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) is an important cereal crop grown in hot, drought prone environments around the world to produce grain, forage and industrial products. Sorghum is grown as staple inbred crop for smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia, and as a hybrid crop in commercial agriculture. Possessing excellent abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, sorghum is a climate-smart crop and the genetic improvement of is essential to fully developing it potential.

In this edition dedicated to sorghum improvement, we wish to gather expertise from elite sorghum research groups to publish 10–15 articles addressing important aspects of sorghum crop improvement. The topics/subjects of emphasis include:

1. Genetic diversity: its importance and use in sorghum breeding programs. 2. Breeding methodologies: new approaches to decreasing the cycle time to produce new cultivars such as haploid induction, speed breeding and evaluation techniques. 3. Genomics: application of marker-assisted and genomic selection. 4. Phenomics: utilization of high throughput phenotyping and phenomic data. 5. Gene editing and transformation technology for trait modification in sorghum. 6. Statistical approaches to mitigate environment, management and their interaction with genotypes. 7. Breeding sorghum as a climate smart crop: unique traits to enhance sustainability or new types of sorghum for more sustainable production of bioindustrial products.

For application-based studies, field testing with a minimum of four environments and appropriate genotypes are necessary. Methodology and conceptual manuscripts will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

We desire research in sorghum crop improvement that is novel and pertinent to the goal of improving the breeding process to create productive new germplasm. All publications will be open access and available online. Publication fees will be fully waived for papers submitted to this special issue.

Professor William L. Rooney

Guest Editor

Keywords

Genomics

Phenomics

Breeding Methods

Genetic Diversity

Grain Sorghum

Forage Sorghum

Bioenergy Sorghum

Gene Editing

Genetic Transformation

Gene-Flow

Abiotic Tolerance

Biotic Tolerance

Submission Deadline: 15 August 2023

Online Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online through Hapres Online Submission System. Please visit Guide for Authors before submitting a manuscript. Authors are encouraged to submit a paper as soon as it is ready and don’t need to wait until the deadline. Submissions will be sent to peer-review in order of arrival. Accepted papers will be published continuously in Crop Breeding, Genetics and Genomics (CBGG) and then gathered together on the special issue webpage. If interested to contribute, please submit a 200–300 words pitch to the Editorial Office indicating a tentative title, authors, and key points of the study for pre-approval.

See Papers Published in This Special Issue

Note

Virtual Special Issue (VSI) is a collection of papers centered around a specific topic, led by an expert (Guest Editor) in the field. Virtual Special Issues are an important component of our journal and cover current hot topics within the scope of the journal.

All papers belonging to a Virtual Special Issue will be gathered together on a single webpage. They are published in the regular issues of the journal as soon as publishable, and labeled as belonging to the Virtual Special Issue. A link from each paper will take you to the Virtual Special Issue website.

Submissions to Virtual Special Issues will undergo the same rigorous peer-review process as regular papers submitted to the journal.

Guest Editor

Professor William L. Rooney

Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 77843, USA