The International Plant and Animal Genome conference (PAG32) took place January 10-15, 2025 in San Diego, California. The meeting focuses on fostering an opportunity to exchange ideas and share recent developments and future plans for plant and animal genome projects through technical presentations, poster sessions, exhibits and workshops.
Dr. Yinghua Huang, USDA-ARS, did an excellent job organizing a diverse set of speakers for the Sorghum/ Millet Workshop. Though it was early in the morning on Sunday, it was well attended. Doreen Ware, from the USDA-ARS and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, gave a talk titled, “Empowering Sorghum Research: SorghumBase as a Hub for Genomic Data and Community Collaboration.” The talk included updates on the SorghumBase platform and the progress of the working groups. Jianqiang Shen, from the University of California Berkeley, gave a talk, “High-Efficiency Transformation Tools Used to Expand Editing Capabilities in Sorghum,” where he discussed a study in which they developed and optimized CRISPR/Cas9-based editing tools to achieve high editing efficiency in the sorghum variety RTx430. Deepti Nigam, a post-doc at Texas Tech University, gave a talk, “Metabolome-Scale Genome-Wide Association Studies Illuminate Chemical Diversity and Genetic Regulation of Metabolism in Sorghum Grains,” which demonstrated the power of untargeted metabolite profiling of the Sorghum Association Panel (SAP) in characterizting novel candidates for seed quality improvement. A scientist from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Meng Xie, presented a talk, “Using Functional Genomic Approaches to Understand the Gene Regulatory Network Controlling Flowering Time in Sorghum.” His research focused on the functional characterization of transcriptional repressor SbGhd7; specifically, its overexpression completely prevented sorghum flowering in both short and long photoperiods. Clara Maria Cruet-Burgos, a post-doc at Colorado State University, discussed the updated BTx623 v5 genome and how it provides new insights into sorghum’s evolutionary history, genomic architecture, and trait biology in her talk, “New Pangenome Resources for Sorghum: A Platform for Accelerated Trait Discovery and Delivery.” Ephrem Habyarimana, from International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics concluded the workshop with his talk, “Perennial Sorghum (S. bicolor (L.) Moench): A Dependable and Cost-Effective Agro-Ecological Solution to Vulnerable Ecosystems in the Drylands.” After the workshops there were active discussions on the progress within the community. In the next year, SorghumBase will be coordinating with the speakers on integration of these novel data resources.
