© www.missouriplants.com

Sorghum bicolor (sorghum) is a food and feed cereal crop that originated in Africa and is adapted to heat and drought. It is a staple food for 500 million of the world's poorest people. Sorghum bicolor belongs to the Panicoideae which is a subfamily of the Poaceae (formerly known as the Gramineae). Maize and sugar cane are members of the same this subfamily.

Sorghum has a small diploid genome and wide phenotypic diversity which make it an attractive plant for genomic studies. Sorghum carries out carbon fixation through the C4 pathway and is an ideal grass model for comparison with rice which uses the C3 pathway.

Sorghum bicolor has a haploid chromosome number of 10, containing 530 Mb with 33,000 protein-coding genes. The genome contains a high level of repeats (61%). Despite this, a high-quality genome sequence was assembled from homozygous sorghum genotype BTx623 using the whole-genome shotgun technique.