Production costs of bioenergy crops such as sorghum have kept it from growing into a secure, sustainable source of energy. But a new project led by a Texas A&M AgriLife Research sorghum breeder is aimed at changing that.
AgriLife Research, along with Carnegie Mellon University, was recently awarded $3.1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
A major challenge for energy crop breeding programs is the lack of methods to effectively phenotype all of the traits that might directly influence biomass yield and composition, said Dr. Bill Rooney, AgriLife Research plant breeder in College Station and lead researcher for the project.
“An understanding of these traits and their role in productivity is essential to increasing the rate of gain from energy-crop breeding programs,” Rooney said.
He said the DOE funding will be used to develop and deploy an automated phenotyping system. This high-throughput plant phenotyping technology, along with transformational modeling and machine-learning approaches, will significantly increase the rate of genetic improvement for biomass yield and resilience.